This moment triggers my memory of the 1938 Knickerbocker Holiday premier in New York City, where I was born in 1924. In my life’s springtime then, I was captivated by the musical’s song about an older man wooing a young woman. “Life,” he intoned, “is a long passage from a youthful May to the December of life’s end.” He wanted precious time with the show’s star. My star, Lee, is now 94, and I am her centenarian caregiver. It is a labor of love.

Back from the gazebo, we sit in our apartment, in precious aloneness. November’s fleeting days are evident on a wall calendar that will soon advance. It hangs near photos and mementos from years past.

When I joined the U.S. Army in 1943 after high school graduation, I had no idea of the impact dementia would have on my “third act.” Back then, my life’s story was not yet written. One chapter includes my wartime assignment to a convoy that moved in 1945 from New Guinea up through the Philippine Islands to Manila.

After the war, I met my first wife, Amelita, at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. After marrying, we had two children and divorced in 2005. In 2023, death came calling. That fateful year, my beloved daughter died, my son suffered a heart attack, and their mother passed away from dementia. My son’s sudden illness brought back memories of our family’s earlier years, including four I spent designing and fabricating exhibits for the Smithsonian Institution, a national treasure in our nation’s capital.

I’ve enjoyed many treasures and am grateful, but more than any accolades or grand experiences, including my glimpse on a trip of the fabled and wondrous Treasury of Petra in Jordan, my greatest treasure has been Lee. We returned today to “her” gazebo, savoring the fading light. I sighed, not with regret, but from the presence of a terrible mind thief.

As I help Lee to bed this evening, I know that the December of life’s end will eventually come. We cannot know who will leave first, but I pray that we see one last sunray through the trees turn “Lee’s Gazebo” golden. Please, dear Powers of the Universe, may December not linger—let it be mercifully brief.

Barbara K. Cleary is a graduate of the City University of New York and publishes an international education blog http://attentionology.com. She has conducted writing workshops and programs to entertain and inspire adults in regional retirement communities since 2005. She has also produced radio programming, including The Medical Minute, for the North Carolina News Network. Cleary’s awards include the North Carolina Governor’s Business Award and a National Top Ten Business Woman award.

Information on Dementia:

• Dementia diagnoses affect some 10 percent of the U.S. adult population in 2025. (Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

• In 2019, an estimated 5 million Americans are living with dementia, and this number is projected to nearly double to over 10 million by 2050, .(Source: The Lancet, Vol 7, Feb 2022))

• After age 55, four in 10 adults are likely to develop some form of dementia. (Source: Nature Medicine Journal, January, 2025)

The post November Song—Walter Marinetti’s Story appeared first on 3rd Act Magazine.

So how do we do that? How do we approach an event we know is inevitable, but we’d really rather not attend? Advances in medical treatment have made many of us feel that planning for the end of life, or even acknowledging that death might be imminent, means that we’re giving up. Our doctors may want us to focus on recovery instead of dying. The people we love may want us to “keep fighting,” on the chance that we could survive a while longer, even if treatment has become more of a burden than a benefit. 

Here’s the reality: Good information and thoughtful planning can help you stay in control of your life up until the end. Your loved ones will fare better emotionally after your death. Best of all, you are very likely to live longer, and enjoy yourself more, if you approach treatment and make choices based on what you really want. You can plan a good death. 

Trudy James helps people “live deeply and die well.” A long-time hospital chaplain, she spent decades comforting dying patients and their caregivers. In retirement, she began getting people together to talk about dying before it became a short-term reality. It’s generally easier to discuss death when it’s still more of a concept. 

“People carry around very fearful images of death. I try to replace those images with the naturalness of it and give them some control,” says Trudy. Being able to talk about wrapping up a life is an important part of doing it well and enjoying the time that’s left. 

Through her organization, Heartwork, Trudy and other trained facilitators lead groups in four-session workshops. It starts with stories, as people share their own experiences or thoughts about death, saying goodbye, and the legacy they want to leave. They learn about available resources, and they discuss the essential decisions that will have to be made at some point. By the end of the workshop, Trudy hopes participants will have completed an advance directive and talked to their families about their wishes. 

Essential decisions include: 

• Treatment choices, including possible discontinuation of treatment.
• Choosing the person who will make health care decisions for you if you can’t make them yourself.
• Hospice care, organ donation, death with dignity, dying at home, quality of life.
• Funeral or memorial service wishes.

In 1994, the Project on Death in America began a nine-year mission to “transform the culture and experience of dying” through providing grants for research, developing model systems of care, and a Faculty Scholars Program to train palliative care specialists. Dr. Anthony Back, a PDIA grant recipient, is now co-director of UW Medicine’s Cambia Palliative Care Center of Excellence. “This is a specialty that cares for patients with serious illnesses throughout their treatment and end of life,” explains Back. He says it’s becoming the standard of care in many hospitals. 

There are misconceptions about palliative care. One is that it means giving up medical treatment. Another is that people don’t need it until close to the end of life. Instead, says Dr. Back, the point of palliative care is to help you live as well as possible for as long as you can. 

Providers of palliative care include doctors, nurses, social workers, and spiritual caregivers. Ideally, they’re part of a seriously ill patient’s medical team early on. They help patients and families understand the context of all the medical information they’re getting, so that they can make decisions that include consideration of their own values. 

“We’re helping patients figure out if a treatment is still worth it. Will it help me do the things that I still need to do in my life?” says Back. He adds that advanced cancer patients who receive palliative care may actually live longer. 

Hospice is an option for terminally ill people to receive care and support, usually at the patient’s home or the home of a loved one, although services are available in other settings. To qualify, recipients must have a life-threatening illness with a prognosis of six months or less to live. An RN case manager coordinates a team that offers services such as counseling for patient and family, bathing, chores, errands, medicine oversight, massage, or music therapy. Dana Brothers, outreach and communications manager at Hospice of the Northwest, says that, “Once someone is on hospice, it’s about comfort and meeting the goals of the patient.” 

Hospice can also provide equipment to make life easier at home, such as a hospital bed, oxygen, a bedside table or a commode. Sometimes it’s more personal. Hospice of the Northwest was caring for a woman who wanted to die at her cabin on Orcas Island, but it wasn’t possible. So her hospice team collected shells and flowers for her, reminding her of the beach. 

Patients who go on hospice often live longer than expected. They may leave and return. As Brothers says, death is the most important event that will occur to every single person, and we should plan for it so that we can live the way we want. 

I’ve heard it said that knowing your expiration date can be a gift, allowing time to complete your bucket list, mend fences, or quit your job and go to France. It may not be that way for everyone, but just knowing there are options available is a great comfort. 

Alice, my mom, took control of her life with help from her daughters. As often happens with pancreatic cancer, it wasn’t found early enough for lifesaving treatment. After a few chemotherapy sessions to reduce the tumor, she agreed with her doctor that additional chemo would not make a difference and would, in fact, make her life less pleasant. 

The next few months were busy. Alice finished writing a family history, watched Dancing with the Stars every week, and enjoyed visits with her many friends. She decided that 2009 was not a good year to die and announced that she would wait for 2010. After designing her cemetery stone and having it installed, she went to see it several times with anyone who wanted to go. She was quite proud of it. 

Hospice providers washed Alice’s hair, gave her sponge baths, changed her sheets, and massaged her legs. Her case manager kept an eye on her medications, ordered a hospital bed, and brought in oxygen. Alice was slipping away, but she was doing it on her own terms. 

On my last visit, we planned Mom’s memorial service together and made arrangements to donate her brain for research. I will always be grateful that she could talk with me about those things, and that she gave me a very special message before I went home to Seattle. She died in 2010, with my sister beside her. 

Alice had a good life, right up until the end. I miss her every day, but I have a painting of her that makes me smile. She’s wearing a hat and her elfin grin…and very little else. She did it her way. 

Priscilla Charlie Hinckley has been a writer and producer in Seattle television and video for 35 years, with a primary interest in stories covering health and medicine, women’s and children’s issues, social justice, and education. She enjoys taking a light-hearted approach to serious topics. 

We first published this story in 2017. On hospice and surrounded by her family, Trudy James died at home on October 20, 2024. Her work lives on. – Editor 

Resources 

hospicenw.org 

speakingofdying.com 

depts.washington.edu/pallcntr/ 

We Wish We Had Heard About Hospice Sooner

Hospice Care – Making a Difference

Jennifer James on the Bittersweet Reality of Being 80

The post The End of Life – and a Good Death Planning for the Inevitable Can Add Joy to the Journey appeared first on 3rd Act Magazine.

BY ELIZABETH SHIER

My dad died on May 16, 2024. He had emphysema and the (undiagnosed) beginnings of dementia, but neither was the direct cause of his death. Due to the agency granted him through the Death with Dignity laws in Washington state, he was able to orchestrate his own death and last day of his life as a victory lap—a celebration of life filled with gratitude and dignity. It was one of the best weeks of his life. I couldn’t have imagined it, but his last week was one of my favorite weeks, too.

Eleven months before, my dad, John Shier, decided to move from his longtime home in Green Bay, Wis., to the Seattle assisted living community where I work as a director. He was on hospice and wanted to be closer to me, his only child, and to my mom’s family in the Pacific Northwest. He’d lost my mom in 2022 after her long battle with a rotten neurological disease, and his emphysema had robbed him of the ability to do many of the things that gave his life meaning and purpose. In light of these losses, and facing further decline, he felt that the full circle of his life was complete. Always an avid reader, educator, and activist, he was hell-bent on being back in the driver’s seat of his own life and that meant pursuing Death with Dignity.

My dad was uniquely qualified to pursue a groundbreaking and unconventional death. Those who knew and loved him would say that this was the perfect death for him. He had a PhD in philosophy of religion from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. From teaching, he went into advocacy work for seniors. Losing his best friend to cancer at 40 motivated him to spend almost 20 years as a hospice volunteer. Then rather than retire, at 60 he went back to school to become a hospice nurse and later wrote the book, Choose Today, Live Tomorrow—Notes from That Guy Nurse. He was keenly aware of the ways our health care system fails people at end of life. He preached loudly that our system prolongs life at the expense of well-being, therefore, he was committed to honoring his hospice patients and to preserving their quality of life as much as possible until the end. As an avowed atheist, he was not a typical church member, yet he remained active and engaged all his life, bringing philosophy to hard Christian conversations. It is difficult to imagine anyone with a richer or informed perspective on end-of-life issues.

My dad inspired me in many ways. I chose a career that places me at the center of aging and in close proximity to death. I deeply appreciate my elders and my days are filled with laughter, great conversation, and purpose. Aging and death are part of living. Most people who live in the community where I work are nearing the end of their lives, which creates a heightened appreciation of the time we have together.

I have lost friends, role models, amazing family members, and my own mom. Yet, in all the passings I have known, none could be described as joyful leave-takings. Death often arrives after a long, slow, and painful decline. And all the while we guiltily wonder, “How long will this go on?”

Over an 18-month period my conversations with dad were peppered with talk of his death, discussions about his life feeling complete, and his frustration over just waiting to die. He viewed Death with Dignity as a path toward ending the feeling of being in limbo.

My love for my dad is intense and complex, and respecting his decision did not come easily in the beginning. I would have loved for him to find enough joy in our Sunday outings to want to stay around for a few more years. I wanted more of chasing Thomas Dambo’s trolls, more ferry rides, and more gelato. In early April, his signature impatience kicked in and I got serious about finding him a doctor willing to prescribe the necessary medication. Dr. Darrell Owens at the University of Washington Medical Center turned out to be the right man for the job. He spent a full hour talking with my dad to assess his candidacy and prognosis. It took another week and some help from the good volunteers at End of Life Washington to find a second doctor we needed by law to agree. A week later I walked out of the pharmacy with his prescription labeled “WARNING: Contents fatal if ingested.” It felt surreal. I’m not sure how to express it, but it felt like a big win for my dad. And a win for me, too, the daughter making this dream a reality.

I have been learning more about ambiguous loss and grief since dad’s death. Ambiguous loss is a term coined by Dr. Pauline Boss in the 1970s. She used it to describe grief that has no definitive boundary or closure. My dad experienced ambiguous loss over the decline of his health and well-being and the uncertainty of when his life would end. I experienced ambiguous loss as I watched him go through that process.

My dad was a powerful and impassioned activist, opinionated, and constantly in motion my entire life. As soon as he chose a date for the end of his life, he reclaimed his identity and was back to the man I’d always known and loved. His thinking grew clearer by the day and I watched him have thoughtful conversations and make plans for a living eulogy party, complete with vodka martinis. Crazy, but true, this process gave me back the Dr. John Shier I knew and loved.

As a gifted keynote speaker, during his last week we recorded an interview for StoryCorps, which is now available and cataloged at the U.S. Library of Congress. We treated ourselves to a Seattle opera, threw a beautiful backyard birthday party, had a fantastic dinner with family at Ray’s Boathouse, and fulfilled his dream of riding in a Tesla. The grand finale was a living eulogy party. His oldest and dearest friends and family from across the country Zoomed in and his neighbors and caregivers gathered, while dad and I regaled everyone with stories from his lifetime of activism and adventure. The day before he died, his best friends roasted him and he was riddled with laughter. As we hugged goodbye that night he said, “I never knew it could be like this.”

On the day of his death, he played cribbage with his favorite bath aid, our chef made him a fantastic lunch and someone from our culinary team baked him a cake on her day off and brought it to him. Another team member wrote him a song and performed it. One by one his care team sought him out for hugs, conversation, prayers, and well wishes. The experience of saying goodbye to someone who is present and able to truly be with us at the end is unique. We say too many goodbyes and most are nothing like this. I was moved beyond words to see the grace, beauty, love, and humor so many brought to my dad’s last days.

As the afternoon waned, we gathered our favorite people in my dad’s apartment, and he toasted all of us with gratitude for a wonderful life and for everyone he loved and who had loved him so well. He gifted his ring to my husband. There was ceremony and joy. He swallowed his medication with his favorite cocktail. He was laughing right up until the moment he closed his eyes and took his last breath.

Death with Dignity is Not a Right Everywhere

Because Death with Dignity is a legal option in Washington state, my dad was able to be fully present for every remarkable moment that we got to enjoy together that last week. He charged me to share his story because we both believe it fundamentally changes the narrative about end-of-life. He would love knowing that you are reading this right now. He would be over the moon to think that he inspired a conversation on end-of-life options at your dinner table. He would be elated to think his death might provide inspiration to others to embrace their own best last weeks and to advocate for Death with Dignity where it is not currently available.

Eight states have enacted Death with Dignity legislation: California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Maine, and Vermont.

Six states have Death with Dignity legislation pending: Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.

To learn more about end-of-life planning and Death with Dignity laws in your state, go to deathwithdignity.org

With Deepest Gratitude

My eternal gratitude for the incredible care provided by the team at Aegis Madison. In all of my years working with remarkable teams, I was still blown away by the support and love you gave my family. And to Dr. Darrell Owens for the time you gave my dad. Your willingness to write his script changed everything. The entire team at Continuum Hospice was stellar: You listened, you counselled, you leaned in, and you held our hands. Our thanks as well to Aegis Queen Anne at Rogers Park and a shout out to Katterman’s Pharmacy on Sand Point Way—not all pharmacies will fill this special prescription. Most of all, thank you dad. You showed me, once again, what is possible with determination and an open heart and mind.

Elizabeth Shier was born and raised in DePere, Wis., graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, and has split her career between grant writing in San Diego, heavy-equipment operation in Antarctica, and senior living in Seattle. She is married and parents two cats. Weekends are spent hiking and making art.

Death with Dignity—Your Life. Your Death. Your Choice.

Living Well and Dying With Dignity

Being Mortal—Planning for a Gentle Death

The post The Best Last Week appeared first on 3rd Act Magazine.

It’s indecent to stalk the dead poet. I know that. Bill Kenney, 89 when he died, was the spring breeze in winter. Dying of cancer, he joked dryly, waxed humbly in his haiku about the smallness of our earthly moments, which made him seem impossibly large standing all alone out there on the cliff edge.

           family album

           the stories we tell

           the camera

From Kenney’s posthumous collection, Tap Dancing in My Socks (Red Moon Press/2022), that poem can serve as a field guide for much of his work. His four volumes, all from Red Moon, are dotted with anti-stories about ourselves, in which our array of posturings are sanded down.

         happy hour

        we don’t mention

        the cancer

I came late to Kenney, just as Kenney came late to haiku. He began writing haiku at age 72 (I started at 82.) We were octogenarians together wandering around New York at the same time. Had our paths ever crossed?

In his absence, they seem to cross every day, everywhere, especially when I am alone in the late hours of the night.

         old photo

        the stranger

       I’ve become

Those moments in old age of feeling suddenly stranded. Feet not quite on the ground, but not yet under it.

There is a video of him reading from his first collection, The Earth Pushes Back (2016) in Santa Fe. Hairless, more or less, jaw slanted a bit, he read with a disarming simplicity.

“I have this problem,” he began, “you have it too: How do you begin to write a poem when so many poems have already been written? How do you begin to write a haiku when so many haiku have already been written?”

Inclusive, playfully conspiratorial, he had the audience immediately in his pocket. The wise vulnerable father everyone wishes they had. He explained at one point how the haiku he was about to read got written. A “butterfly” haiku. The winged warhorse of the genre.

“At first I wrote, butterfly/ how long/ will I remember you. A delightful moment with the butterfly. How long will it last? But looking at it on the page, I wasn’t satisfied. The butterfly just seemed to be lying there somehow. Then I thought what I really wanted to ask is butterfly/ how long will you/ remember me.”

The poet’s concern with mortality is culled gently from the unlikely subject of the butterfly. Seen from this unexpected angle, we get a deeply unsettling betrayal of our normal butterfly expectation of well-being. We get transformative insight.

“There was a tinge of mortality to whatever he touched,” Red Moon publisher Jim Kacian, remembers. “As though he knew his time in haiku wouldn’t be long.”

       rainy autumn…

      the last time we did it

      a second time

An inadvertent “Ah” arises within me. I have arrived, with Kenney, at a mutual crossing point. Geriatric dating, where emptiness goes to fill itself with what has gone. Man’s last chance to play romantic roulette.

What, I wonder, would Master Basho make of the geriatric dating haiku? Open to all sorts of strange experiences himself, he may well have been amused or bemused.

But his more parochial successors, wedded to the standard haiku nature poem, would no doubt have been scandalized.

Having been where Kenney went, I know of the caution its risk management (lover at 80/ quietly/ wanna lie down?) requires. Kenney had the talent to turn amorous dross into haiku gold.

      safe sex

     saying nothing

     I’ll regret

Or this:

     singles bar

    she tells him she always

    picks losers

His trade-off—the aliveness of eros contending against the blows of rejection on the lip of the grave.

The yawning space at the right-hand margin allows the reader a long pause to take it all in, to be the participant in what has been said or left unsaid, to relate and project his or her own story. My projection was trying to imagine myself as Kenney, old and dying, but able to remain engaged and kind to the end. How to remain open while everything around you is closing down.

    prognosis terminal

   his favorite ice cream

  melts in the cup

The courage to shake off all illusions, to display quietly the little that remains in the poet’s punctured bag.

In the background always, his gentle ironic hum.

  wind advisory

  I cut one more word

 from a haiku

With a little luck, it will land in my pocket. The man knew what he was looking at. He could winnow the genuine from the fake without making a big fuss about either.

   soft rain

   the way the oncologist

   says, “we.”

Bill Kenney, poet laureate of mortality.

Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based writer and poet. He has spent much of the last five years writing and assembling poems about his mother’s Alzheimer’s. In 2019, Presa Press published a volume of his poems titled, The Road to Canaan. His work has appeared in Parabola, Tricycle, Spirituality & Health, Sojourners, The Moth (Ireland), Tears in The Fence (UK), and other publications.     

Read more by Robert Hirschfield:

Two Old Poets: Portrait of A Friendship

Remembering Is What We Bring: An Old Man Recalls An Old Friend

Haiku: Discovering George Swede

An Old Man, A Long-Forgotten Pitcher, An Obsession Remembered

Alzheimer’s Remembered: A Journey in Poetry

Julia and I — Late Love in the Time of COVID

Julia and I

The post Being Part of The Afterlife of Bill Kenney appeared first on 3rd Act Magazine.

By MARILEE CLARK

I once read that grief is a lonely solitary room. Truly, for me it was. Friends and family can provide some comfort, yet most experience sorrow as personal and private. Those who share a similar loss will experience something comparable, although not the same. We can console one another by sharing stories and trying to be empathetic, but ultimately, we still come up short because each is on our own grief journey.

This is a journey that cannot be rushed, wished away, or powered through—only survived. If you can accept this one truth, then you can lean into your singular sorrow and find ways to build a new life around your grief. I have come to believe that this is the best approach to grief: You can’t get through it or around it, but you can isolate and insulate grief as your new life without your loved one unfolds. In other words, you learn how to live solo with a “Yay me!” frame of mind.

That new life may include staying single. This is not to say that as a widow or widower, you won’t have another relationship in your future, or that it is not something for which to hope. My message is that you can still lead a full and happy life while consciously choosing to remain single after the death of a spouse—or even after divorce. Yay me!

I recently Googled, “Is it normal to be happy alone?” Apparently, to my great relief, it is. Being alone and enjoying one’s solitude and company is very different from being lonely. I have carved out a new life for myself that—despite missing my sweetheart every day—fulfills me. I am blessed to have a large circle of wonderful family and friends, lots of interests and activities, and a deep curiosity to learn and expand my mind. Yay me!

I have learned to quietly say to myself Yay me! when I tackle something challenging, like when I attended a wedding in Portugal alone, or go to a large cocktail party where I only know a few guests. And these days if I want to see a movie or play, I just go by myself. Fortunately, I have found that this is not all that uncommon anymore. As a self-assessed introvert, embracing these—outside my comfort zone—activities are worth a pat on the back. Yay me!

Yet, my alone time is where I really find strength. It is the recharge I need after going out in the world. I hope every person gets to experience the pleasure of one’s own company as it is very life-affirming. I once picked up a small prose book called My Best Friend only to discover that the author was writing about himself. We should all be our own best friends and cheerleaders. Yay me!

After losing her husband in 2021, Marilee Clarke began writing her book on navigating grief. Excerpts from the book (still in progress) often appear in this magazine. Her passions include mixed media creations and traveling the world every chance she gets. She currently splits her time between Issaquah and the California desert enjoying the best of two very different and beautiful locales.

Editor: I was unable to find the referenced book, My Best Friend, but here’s one that looks interesting—On My Own: The Art of Being a Woman Alone.

More 3rd Act articles on navigating grief:

Blue Days

Navigating Grief— Blue Days

Finding Joy in Sorrow

Finding the Joy in Sorrow

Compounded Grief

Do You Have Compounded Grief?

Eating Solo

Five Ways to Enjoy Eating Solo at Home

The post Navigating Grief—Yay Me! appeared first on 3rd Act Magazine.

For as long as human beings have had life, they have been trying to either survive or extend it.

On December 30, 1999, Sarah Knauss entered the final day of her life at a nursing home in Pennsylvania. Despite the loss of her hearing and recent doses of oxygen, she was not ill at the time. The week before, she visited her hairdresser and wished a volunteer at her nursing home a Happy New Year. At the time, Knauss had a daughter, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren.

Knauss passed away peacefully that afternoon, two days short of the year 2000. It would have been the third different century of her life. She was 119.

At the time of her death, Knauss—born in 1880—held the crown of the oldest person alive. She was part of a group of supercentenarians pushing the upper limits of human longevity. The current average life expectancy for the U.S. population is 76.1 years, but many live beyond these estimates. The number of centenarians (those at or over the age of 100) is projected to reach more than 25 million by 2100.

The modern movement striving for this longevity is one of abundance. The “anti-aging” industry is estimated to be worth $600 billion by 2025. Researchers are beginning to pinpoint the maximum length of human lives. One study, published in 2021, found that the upper limits of human lifespans could lie around 120-150 years.

Outside of Silicon Valley, there are a number of different worldviews committed to aging and death and our ability to change it—life-extensionists, longevists, super-longevists, anti-death activists, and anti-aging activists.

James Strole, the executive director of the Coalition for Radical Life Extension—a nonprofit based in Arizona that connects people who seek to alter their lifespans—prefers the immortality worldview.

“I want to live with vitality and strength in an unlimited way,” he said in a recent interview.

Strole’s organization hosts a yearly event called RAADfest—the Revolution Against Aging and Death Festival. RAADfest (a “Woodstock for radical life extension,” Strole said) features speakers from the longevity and life-extension community. At the first RAADfest in 2016, Strole—who has no scientific background—recalled sharing what the movement is about: “I said, ‘Look, we shouldn’t be fighting each other on this planet, we should be fighting our worst enemy: aging and death.’”

Back in the late 1990s, Knauss offered a view on her lifespan. According to a local paper, when she was told about being the oldest living person alive, Knauss replied, “So what?”

For as long as human beings have had life, they have been trying to either survive, extend, or immortalize it—and altering life has often involved considerations of older age.

In 1550, an Italian nobleman named Louis Cornaro wrote, “I never knew the world was beautiful until I reached old age.”

A popular view at the time of his writing was that humans were endowed with a certain amount of “vital energy,” according to Carole Haber, a professor of history at Tulane University and the author of a 2004 paper on the history of longevity movements. The key to living longer, they believed, was maintaining and conserving this energy through moderation in diet and lifestyle.

During the Enlightenment, this view of older age persisted in the minds of prominent 17^th– and 18th-century thinkers. Many during this time saw old age as a unique stage in life.

“It’s [aging]good if you are economically viable. And a man,” Haber said in a recent interview.

In the 1800s, scientific discovery in France rapidly altered this view of aging. Paris became the first site of autopsies linking physiological changes in the body (like damaged arteries, eyes, or hearing) to old age itself. Physicians in the 19th century began questioning the course of aging: What is part of the aging process, and what is a disease?

“And they came to the conclusion … that what is normal is a disease. And that disease is called aging,” Haber said. Aging was then something to attack or solve.

Haber cites a small—“though well-publicized”—group of men in the early 20th century who took charge in the fight to reverse aging with sexual gland transplants. This notion of attacking aging persists into the 21st century with a modern approach. Strole told me he has used stem cell therapy and nutritional supplements to keep his body “vibrant.”

Longevity Escape Velocity and Immortality

One theory of today’s immortalists like Strole is the longevity escape velocity, the notion that technology advances in prolonging life will exceed the rate of aging bodies. Strole hopes to “live long enough to live forever.”

Matt Kaeberlein, a former professor of pathology and former director of the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute at the University of Washington, emphasized to me that “there’s just no evidence that we’re getting closer to that at this point, based on published peer-reviewed scientific data.”

The scientific possibilities around extending our healthspans only come with dedicated resources and attention. “The probability of what could be accomplished is sort of lost when you talk about unrealistic expectations,” Kaeberlein says.

Increasing lifespans to 150 years may be an achievement, “but who is that going to benefit if that’s not available to everyone?” says Alessandro Bitto, an acting assistant professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Washington. He points out that many people still fall below the median life expectancy.

While the language and financial incentives around altering lifespans may be recent innovations, the modern characterization of older age—as a stage in life, as an economic threat to American progress, and a foil to the early days of Cornaro—morphed into something akin to death. Haber writes that the new anti-age movement’s “ideas and actions ultimately serve to marginalize the very process of growing old.”

In 2017, the aging philosopher and Professor of Gerontology Jan Baars wrote, “we do not die because we have become old but because we have been born as finite human beings: death is given with life.”

As one moderator put it at the 2023 RAADfest, many people don’t just want to make life last longer—they want to make life last. Strole himself claims that “we learn to take on the mortal mind.”

But Baars proposed a “repositioning of aging,” as learning to live a finite life that views aging not as a problem but as a process, one with which we are all engaged. Many organizations have dedicated resources to understanding the later stages of our finite lives. The founding of the American Geriatrics Society and The Gerontological Society of America, Haber wrote in the 2004 study, worked to separate “normal” old age from “treatable, pathological conditions.”

“You know, it’s really very peculiar. To be mortal is the most basic human experience and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly,” Milan Kundera wrote in Immortality. “Man doesn’t know how to be mortal.”

Learning to live within this paradigm of aging is and will always be part of our history. Part of being human is grappling with what it might mean not to be.

Zachary Fletcher is a freelance journalist covering aging and other news, most recently for The Kitsap Sun/USA Today. His work has appeared in PBS’s Next Avenue and The Sacramento Bee, among other publications. He lives in Seattle with his partner. Learn more about him at https://fletcherzachary.weebly.com/.

See these 3rd Act Articles on Longevity:

Longevity Planning—Forecast: Sunny with a Chance of Rain—Longevity planning focuses on five key drivers of modern retirement success: finances, legal, health, housing, and family. By simplifying, dignifying, and unifying our lives and those of our loved ones, we can radically change the odds in our favor.

The post Striving for Immortality appeared first on 3rd Act Magazine.

BY MARILEE CLARKE

As we get older it becomes harder and harder to escape grief. I, surprisingly, made it to 64 without losing a single friend or family member in my inner circle. Elderly grandparents, of course, but no one dying tragically or unexpectedly. Then, over two years, I lost my husband, my mother, and just recently, a best friend. This is the definition of compounded grief, and it is not an uncommon plight for those of us in our third act. My 96-year-old father laments the loss of his beloved wife and most of his lifelong friends. This kind of loss becomes inevitable when you live a long life.

The danger of compounded or cumulative grief is that you can become numb to loss and unable to fully process each significant event. As I found with my husband’s death, I needed the better part of a year to work through the complicated emotions of losing a spouse. However, when my mother passed away and then shortly after, my oldest friend in the world, my mother’s death seemed overshadowed. This was partly because by the time she died she was not the mother I had known all my life. Her dementia had slowly deepened over the years and she’d faded away.

Give Yourself Time to Process Each Loss

I am now trying to return to this significant event and do the necessary work to process my grief. I made a photo album of all the pictures I could find of my mother as I want to remember her, and that helped a little. But I still find myself thinking of her as she was in those last few years, and I can only hope that those sad visual memories will eventually fade and the ones in my scrapbook will return. This is an example of giving yourself time to process a loss. Some losses will take much longer than others. Another idea is to create a specific ritual to isolate and honor each loss. A memorial service or a scattering of ashes somewhere special are common ones, but there are other things that can help such as wearing a clothing item or a piece of jewelry that belonged to the deceased, or writing them a letter outlining everything you loved about them. The message here is the importance of processing each sorrow fully and independently of any others. I am still working on this.

Seek Support for Compounded Grief

A final important tool to deal with compounded grief is to seek support through friends, organized support groups, and by talking to a therapist skilled in grief counseling. Chances are you will find that your cumulative grief is not uncommon and that there are others out there dealing with the same heavy weight of multiple deaths. The important thing is to not lump all losses together. Each one represents a significant change in your life dynamic and needs to be seen as such and processed independently.

Marilee Clarke lives in Issaquah and loves the Northwest’s natural beauty. She is a collage artist and her passions include travel and anything creative. She and her late husband taught a course at Bellevue College on “How to get the most out of your retirement years” and that is just what she’s doing!

The post Do You Have Compounded Grief? appeared first on 3rd Act Magazine.

After years of research and design, Katrina Spade developed the process of human composting and helped Washington State become the first state to legalize it in 2019. Katrina founded Recompose, a full-service green funeral home serving clients nationwide. As a public benefit corporation and the world’s first human composting company, Recompose is growing a worldwide movement to reimagine the end-of-life experience to be rooted in nature.

Why did you dedicate a decade of your life to creating a new type of death care?

As a graduate student in architecture, I began looking at the U.S. funeral industry because I knew I didn’t want to be cremated or buried. I developed human composting as a scalable, sustainable, urban solution to the problem of toxic funeral practices. Rural places have natural burial—a lovely option—but cities lack land to use for any kind of burial. Cremation then becomes the default but often doesn’t align with people’s desire to help the planet with their final act. Composting allows a return to the earth, saves a metric ton of carbon per person over conventional death care, and is designed for the urban landscape—it can conceivably care for billions of people.

How does human composting work?

The key is to create the perfect environment for natural decomposition to occur and microbes to thrive. Our team places the body and a carefully calibrated mixture of plant materials inside specially-designed steel vessels. We monitor aeration and manage the transformation into soil over the next two to three months. At the end of the process, the soil can be kept or donated to our conservation partners, or a combination of both.

What sets Recompose human composting services apart from others?

Many on Recompose’s Services team have worked elsewhere in the funeral industry and believe a better way is possible. They encourage curiosity and learning about the death care process and strive to inform with clarity and care. The team serves as a guide to clients for multiple months during soil transformation.

What motivates you about the future of death care?

There’s a massive shift in death care towards a more open, intentional experience, and a large push to make the funeral industry greener and more transparent. Recompose is at the forefront of this shift—the world is looking to us to lead, educate, and inspire.

 What gives you purpose?

A sister of Wayne, a client, took his soil back to the neighborhood where he’d lived and gardened much of his life. She told us that friends and neighbors took some of Wayne’s soil to their own gardens. I like to think that Wayne is still gardening with his neighbors. Stories like this motivate me to increase awareness about Recompose.

What are people surprised to hear?

We’ve cared for over 300 clients from across the country and world, and we have over 1,500 Precompose members—some as young as Gen Z. Precompose is a prepaid funeral plan that allows members to pay monthly or all at once for their future composting. Members have shared that it’s a tangible way for them to take climate action now and help grow the green funeral movement.

 Want to learn more about human composting?

Recompose is located in Seattle’s Industrial District and open by appointment. Visit our website to schedule a virtual or in-person tour, learn more about human composting, and plan ahead.

Also, check out this 2019 3^rd Act article on Recompose.

The post What Does it Take to Change the Death Care Paradigm? appeared first on 3rd Act Magazine.

Turns out her ecstasy came from finding the perfect place for her husband and herself to be buried. (They’re both very much alive, albeit in their 80s.)

The lilt in her voice had a giddiness about it. Somehow, as the two of them found their way through the many options, this tough undertaking shaped into a joyous glimpse of their hereafter.

They purchased their plots and gravestones at the same time because they wanted to be sure of the location as well as the way the headstones were crafted. Headstones bought at different times might mean they wouldn’t match, she said.

They also hoped to be buried near as many family members as possible, which meant one sad compromise. They’d be buried near a freeway—an artistic sacrifice they were willing to make.

“Uh, you won’t be able to hear the traffic noise,” I said.

“Those who visit us might, though,” she replied.

They decided they wanted to be buried in biodegradable baskets, but a body in a basket can only be unrefrigerated for six hours. That means caskets for their funerals, then transferring their bodies to the baskets for burial. And baskets? Unlike caskets, much deeper holes are required to protect baskets from animal invasions.

The palpable relief in her voice—to have all this plotted out, pun intended—was ethereal, but she shared a warning. Some men, she said, are very sensitive when it comes to discussions about death.

“I really am not afraid of death. My fear is living too long!” she said with a laugh, then added, “What are you two going to do, anyway?”

“We want to be cremated,” I told her.

“Cremated? Wonderful! Then your ashes could be buried in biodegradable boxes to rest on our baskets or what’s left of them. We’ll have room for three boxes of ashes on each basket. How cool that would be!”

That got me thinking. Although she and her husband are great friends, do we want our ashes down under on their baskets—or on anybody else’s, for that matter? Our parents, perhaps? Not in the cards for me. My father was cremated and his ashes were scattered from a plane over Lake Michigan. My mother is buried on a lovely plot that unfortunately is under the flight path to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. I’ve only a few cousins and high school cronies left in the Chicago area. Most deceased members of Howie’s family are buried in Lewis County, Washington.

My friend’s delight to have so much planned ahead of time was contagious. How many urns or biodegradable boxes would we want? Before selecting the perfect urns, boxes, or settings for our ashes, I found online Mary Anne Vance, a savvy Seattle elder law attorney, who shares other options for these difficult decisions.

Some, for example, might want to consider organ donation or a Willed Body Program at a university to help educate medical professionals of the future.

Deciding about someone’s remains has political and environmental implications as well. Skipping the flame is a big part of that. Alkaline hydrolysis, sometimes called water cremation, has less environmental impact because it takes less energy and eliminates direct emissions of greenhouse gases or metals, Vance notes. She also mentions green burials that return bodies to natural burial grounds, such as one owned by White Eagle Memorial Preserve, a nonprofit in Goldendale, Wash.

Climate change has an urgency that continues to create new alternatives. A Seattle firm called Recompose is a licensed funeral home that does human composting to transform bodies into nutrient-rich soil to give to loved ones. Recompose even schedules both small, in-person and virtual guided tours, according to its website.

As a newspaper reporter in the 1970s, I wrote about a suggestion to purchase your own coffin—one with a flat top—when you’re young and healthy. Give it life as a living-room coffee table to help warm up to the notion of your own passing. Funeral directors I interviewed said there weren’t many requests for coffins without funerals, but they liked the idea.

Who would’ve fathomed that coffins might soon become relics of yesteryear?

Annie Culver developed a knack for unearthing oddball characters and improbable events as a staff writer for various newspapers. In the early 90s, she went to work for websites where she wrote sassy essays aimed at women. In recent years, she morphed into a writer for several universities in the Northwest. She retired in 2016, yet still enjoys freelancing.

Read more of Annie Culver’s take on life’s absurdities here.

The post The (Burial) Plot Thickens appeared first on 3rd Act Magazine.

Now that I am on the other side, I have gleaned much from my journey of what’s helpful and what’s not. I got very tired of hearing the platitude, “Our thoughts and prayers are with you.” While I’m sure the sentiment is sincere, it just seems so empty. This is also true for the single obligatory get well or sympathy card. Don’t send just one, send one a week or a month for as long as needed.

The other common refrain that made me weary was, “Let me know if there is anything you need.” This puts the burden back on the one who is just trying to get through each day. As I told my stepson following this offer, “I am so overwrought that I have no idea what I need.” He showed up the next day with a pressure washer and cleaned all the walkways around the house. This is a great example of how to really help. There are so many things that you can just do—weed the garden, clean out the fridge, mow the lawn, drop off a bouquet of flowers, a good book, or a favorite treat like a latte. And instead of saying, “Can I bring you a meal? Say “Can I bring you a meal on Tuesday or Friday?”

Just sitting—even holding the hand of someone who is suffering—is very powerful. Your presence may be all that is needed. If words are important, the best message is a simple, “I am so sorry that you are going through this.” Don’t tiptoe around the situation by saying unhelpful things like “you are looking good,” or suggesting some new treatment you’ve read about. It is not helpful to pretend that everything will be OK if you have no way of knowing that. I also recommend keeping any visit short—15 to 20 minutes is plenty, and the brevity is often a relief to those involved.

An important “do” after someone close to you has lost a loved one is to continue to check on them frequently for at least the first year. Mark the death anniversary on your calendar and reach out on that day. Although many people feel they need to avoid mentioning the deceased, I welcomed the chance to talk and reminisce about my husband. Finally, if you send a sympathy card, don’t just sign your name but include some fond remembrance of the person. And it is especially comforting to hear, “You were a wonderful daughter, wife etc.” during this time of sorrow.

Marilee Clarke lives in Issaquah and loves the Northwest’s natural beauty. She is a collage artist, and her passions include travel and anything creative. She and her late husband taught a course at Bellevue College on “How to get the most out of your retirement years” and that is just what she’s doing!

The post Navigating Grief: Do’s and Don’ts for Helping Those in Distress appeared first on 3rd Act Magazine.