I asked this peculiar question to my two children after reading about "grief tech," the latest wonder child of artificial intelligence that allows the living to remain digitally connected to the dead through "ghostbots."

I explained to our children that they could feed our texts and emails to an A.I. platform that would create chatbots that mimic our language and tone and could respond to them through text after our death.

Although the idea of death made them shudder, their response was immediate and firm: "We don't want an A.I. mommy and daddy. It wouldn't be real."

Grief tech

Like our children, I have had a visceral response to the burgeoning realm of grief tech.

As an attorney and a graduate student of theology, I could not help but envisage the intersections of law, theology and ethics.

And as a Catholic woman who has experienced profound loss and grief in four consecutive miscarriages, these glaring intersections were heightened within my body.

On a cerebral and bodily level, I found myself grappling with what personhood means in relation to grief tech.

With the creation of A.I., anthropomorphised chatbots are one critical example of how the rapidly advancing technology is testing the limits of the human condition.

At this critical juncture, it is important for us, as people of faith and goodwill, to probe A.I.'s potential to divorce us from our humanity.

Grief tech is raising significant issues that bear on what it means to be human, specifically implicating our embodiment, relationality, finitude and death.

Not only does grief tech try to divorce the human body from any concept of personhood, but grief tech's endeavor to immortalise A.I. creations of the deceased stands in opposition to the Christian understanding of death.

Technology does not simply advance without the sanctioning of human beings.

While human existence is vulnerable to grief and death, we must affirm the body as intrinsic to our humanity and to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, through which we enter into relationship with God, ourselves and one another.

Our theological tradition—and specifically the work of Karl Rahner and Tina Beattie—can help us reflect on these imperatives and how they play out in the future.

The spectre of grief tech

A.I. has emerged within the last two years as a formidable instrument of communication and relationship in various arenas.

Large language models (L.L.M.s), a particular form of generative A.I., have facilitated this transition, with L.L.M.s that have been trained using volumes of data acquiring the extraordinary capability to mimic human beings through language.

L.L.M.s are not sentient, but their neural networks enable them to generate lifelike responses that can feel real to actual human beings.

One nascent industry that has capitalised on L.L.M.s is grief tech.

"Death is a lucrative business," wrote Mihika Agarwal in Vox late last year, and grief tech seeks to console the living through apps and programs that "re-create the essence of the deceased."

As intimated by the question to my two children, ghostbots are a distinct version of grief tech.

Through the power of A.I., we can build ghostbots out of the dead using the data—texts, emails, voice conversations, etc.—of our deceased loved ones.

Once L.L.M.s are fed this data, companies like Open A.I., Séance A.I. and You, Only Virtual can generate ghostbots that immortalise the deceased through text-based chat.

Although ghostbots cannot think, feel or have bodily form, their words offer a semblance of humanity by imitating the language of our dearly departed.

Although grief tech is still in its initial phase, it has already transformed the way we grieve.

At the touch of an app, we can quickly comfort ourselves by interacting with ghostbots, short-circuiting the traditional way of grieving.

We can easily download a relationship rather than accept our reality and sit with our loss and pain.

Death loses its sense of finality, emboldening us to maintain relationships even beyond the grave.

The dead may be physically gone, but they can now "‘live' on our everyday devices," wrote Aimee Pearcy in The Guardian last year, buried "in our pockets—where they wait patiently to be conjured into life with the swipe of a finger."

The concreteness of human existence

Ghostbots may bring comfort and closure to the living, but grief tech raises serious issues.

At the outset, there is the risk that users will become emotionally or psychologically dependent on ghostbots due, in part, to their instant accessibility and our ability to imbue them with familiarity and meaning.

Ghostbots may feel real to us, but they cannot supplant healthy, concrete relationships with other human beings.

Entangled with this psychological risk are ethical and legal concerns.

While some companies tout "Do Not Bot Me" clauses and "Digital Do Not Reanimate" orders to prohibit individuals from turning others into ghostbots without their permission, not all grief tech apps and programs require the deceased's consent before they die.

Further, even with these possible legal protections, there remains the issue of enforcement, exacerbated by the fact that we are constantly exchanging photos, texts and emails daily.

We retain the data of others on our digital devices, and no federal law prevents us from building bots out of the dead or the living.

Our legal system's present inability to protect the humanity of the deceased accentuates the final ethical concern of instrumentalisation.

Through generative A.I., we now have the capacity to reduce our deceased loved ones to digital instruments for maintaining relationship.

With their data at our disposal, we can distill their human "essence" and contain it in eternal ghostbots that respond to us 24/7.

Whether the app or program is free or not, grief tech companies are all too willing to monetise the dead as a service to help grieving individuals.

Our dearly departed are resurrected as a technological means of support, one that can comfort us while avoiding the realities of the human body and death.

However, rather than being swept up by A.I.'s wave of "inevitability" as the only future awaiting us, people of faith can demand that we not blithely surrender our humanity to technology.

We must get to the heart of the matter and articulate a philosophical and theological anthropology that respects the concreteness and finality of human existence.

We must do this if we are to challenge grief tech's subterfuge of artificial intimacy as authentic relationship.

What does it mean to be human?

The Christian Scriptures reveal the body as constitutive of the human person. In the Book of Genesis, we are told humans are created in the imago Dei, the image and likeness of God (1:27).

Our inviolable dignity is intrinsic to our bodies, which radiate our imago Dei and particular uniqueness as individuals.

There is no Cartesian separation or Manichean division of our being. To paraphrase the theologian Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, we are our bodies, and the human body is good.

In the Gospels, "the flesh in its dignity" is affirmed and glorified in Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate Son of God.

As Moltmann-Wendel notes, the life of Jesus is about "God's becoming body."

Jesus enters our world through the body of Mary, "begotten rather than fabricated," and his words and actions touch "human beings in their totality, in their bodies."

According to Moltmann-Wendel, we see the totality of human beings most vividly in Jesus' encounter with the woman who bled for 12 unrelenting years (Mk 5:25-34).

After she touches his clothes, grasping Jesus in his bodily nature, the healing between them is body to body.

She is immediately filled with his power and made whole; and he, though experiencing a flowing out of his power, remains whole (v. 29-30).

Through the woman and Jesus, we discover how, as Motlmann-Wendel claims, "God encounters us in the human body," inviting us into communion with him.

In a similar way, the Catholic theologian Margaret A. Farley, R.S.M., illuminates our concrete reality as human beings through her formulation of a sexual ethics that is germane to all human relationships.

In Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, she offers a vision of the human person as an "embodied spirit" or "inspirited body" whom God invites to a destiny of relationship and wholeness.

Crucial to Farley's vision are two obligating features of personhood: autonomy and relationality.

In our autonomy, we can decide our own destiny, and in our relationships, we recognise the intrinsic value of others and our dependency upon them.

Consequently, autonomy and relationality "ground an obligation to respect persons as ends in themselves and forbid, therefore, the use of persons as mere means" (emphasis in the original).

When we instrumentalise others, we violate their autonomy and foreclose the possibility of authentic relationship.

A "just love," then, is true and good insofar as it affirms and respects the concrete reality of the beloved. It proclaims, in word and deed, that "I want you to be, and to be full and firm in being."

In contrast to the anthropologies of Moltmann-Wendel and Farley, grief tech abolishes the human body.

When we encounter one another as persons, we do not meet as diaphanous spirits but as embodied spirits, inspirited bodies, radiating the imago Dei.

Each person is an "incarnate singularity," to use the language of Roberto Dell'Oro in his 2022 article in the Journal of Moral Theology, "Can a Robot Be a Person?"

Each person is unique and possesses an unrepeatable history; our body is inseparable from our destiny; and despite death, we do not lose our humanity.

However, through the power of A.I., grief tech has ruptured what it means to be human.

Death's finality presents grief tech with the lucrative opportunity to discard the body and profit from our loss and pain.

Through ghostbots, companies offer grieving individuals the promise of eternal relationship with the dead.

This promise is destructive and deceptive, divorcing our deceased loved ones from their bodies and extracting an "essence" from their data that fails to capture and affirm the totality of their human existence.

Ghostbots can neither experience nor embody what the deceased loved, what they valued and what they lived for.

Instead, the deceased are reduced to a "stable static entity," to use Agarwal's words.

This "stable static entity" is the antithesis of the complex, dynamic person who is loved by God and birthed into the world.

They are essentialised and homogenised. By dispensing with the human body, the deceased can now be objectified as digital instruments for relationship.

The relationship that grief tech offers is an artificial intimacy that can never replicate the dynamics of human relationship.

A.I. has no relationship with itself and must be programmed to create what human beings intend.

In order to generate ghostbots then, we must feed L.L.M.s the data of the deceased, specifically their words that we want to hear.

We must create the A.I. image of the deceased that we want, with or without their consent.

Thus, what emerges from this interaction is not a two-sided, dynamic relationship between two distinct persons but a one-sided, static relationship with ourselves vis-à-vis a ghostbot.

This is a relationship that we imbue with meaning by using the dead as a means to comfort and console us. It is not just love.

Ultimately, grief tech's flight from the body creates an illusion. When we fail to respect the body, we fail to respect persons as ends in themselves. When we fail to see the body, we fail to see God.

Karl Rahner, Tina Beattie and life through death

Even in death, the human body remains a key element in one's own history.

The flesh, created in the image and likeness of God, is still destined for God and summoned to glory by God.

We cannot deny the vulnerability and finality of the human condition, but we must also recognise how life emerges by way of death in the body story of Jesus.

In the cross, our bodies hold the promise of redemption through Jesus, the "first born from the dead" (Col 1:19).

The theologians Tina Beattie and Karl Rahner can help parse this crucial notion in Christian theology.

Unlike the founder of You, Only Virtual, who wishes to end goodbyes and the human emotion of grief, the theologian Tina Beattie invites us to "befrien[d] death" through the mystery of the Incarnation.

Although death is certain for each one of us, it is also a mystery exempt from human control.

We tend to perceive it as "a mortal enemy," a specter lurking in the shadows until we are forced to confront its undeniable reality.

Beattie recognises our fear but points to the hope embodied in Christian anthropology, which offers a paradoxical view of death as a rebirth and a beginning:

"The death of Christ tells us that God, like us, is vulnerable to love's wounding and sorrow, but the resurrection of Christ whispers of a God whose dying is fecundity," she writes in her book New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory.

Karl Rahner develops this theme of life through death in his book, On the Theology of Death.

He emphasises how death is the universal event that strikes us in our totality as human persons, but cautions that we should not regard death as a pointless suffering nor as a phantom waiting to strike.

Although death remains a great mystery, faith illuminates its truth in the death of Jesus Christ. Jesus, the incarnate Word of God, "became consubstantial with us" and "died our death."

According to Rahner, the real miracle of Christ's death is that death was transformed into life, with the "flesh of sin" transformed into the "flesh of grace."

Death is a consequence of sin, and only in Christ's death could death usher in God's arrival in the final moment of our life when we feel most abandoned by God.

In that moment, sin's power reaches its apex but God's grace overpowers sin.

Consequently, death becomes "the highest act of believing, hoping, and loving," a "faith in darkness, hope against hope, and love of God who only appears as Lord and as inexorable justice."

Through Jesus' death, God's grace becomes ours.

Thus, Rahner invites us to "hearken to the gospel of death, which is life."

Although the natural order of life ends in death, he challenges the dominant view of death as merely a natural process divorced from our spiritual, supernatural existence of grace.

Contrary to Martin Heidegger's notion that human beings are "being-towards-death," moving in life toward death and shaped by its reality, Rahner believes we are being-towards-glory.

From the very beginning of our life, we are not oriented toward death but toward the glory of God, and death is not the end of our existence but the beginning of eternity with God.

This involves the affirmation and fulfillment of the human person through a glorifying change in which the body remains whole. In the glorious grace of Christ's death, we will not perish at death but will be transformed in the resurrection of the body.

In contrast to the Christian anthropology of death presented by Beattie and Rahner, grief tech exploits our fear by offering a semblance of human control over death.

This control is illusory and, to quote Rahner, only "degrades [our] anxiety before death to a mere expression of self-preservation."

We end up trying to extend the finite limits of our own lives by controlling our loved ones in death.

Grief tech cannot alleviate our fear of death, but only pushes us to eternalise the essentialisation of human persons through ghostbots.

Such an attempt perpetuates an artificial intimacy that can never replicate authentic relationship.

Emboldened by A.I. and without the constraints of the law, we can resurrect the dead in our own image and, as a result, the dead cannot rest in peace.

A.I.'s attempt to control or circumvent death diminishes the humanity of the deceased.

Instead of offering immortality, grief tech offers perpetual mortality that can neither capture the totality of our deceased loved ones as human persons nor comprehend the ultimate glory of the body or eternity with God.

The proponents of grief tech are unable to imagine how death could lead to wondrous new life and new relationship with God and one another.

Life after ghostbots

We are our bodies, and our bodies are inextricably tied to our relationship with God, ourselves and one another.

We are not data or digital instruments to be used and manipulated, in life or in death. Furthermore, we must not abandon the human body to try to conquer death.

Though our life in the world will eventually cease, death is not the end of who we are.

We, as human persons, are destined for God, in our beginning and in our end.

The human body is a promise for glory, and Jesus Christ proclaims who we are in his life, death and resurrection.

Despite grief tech's promise to console us through eternal ghostbots, we cannot surrender our humanity for an artificial intimacy divorced from concrete reality.

With the rapid advancement of generative A.I., what is at stake is us.

We are unique persons created and loved by God whose totality cannot be distilled by technology.

Ghostbots are a deformation of the human person, and we must draw the line between the real and the virtual, the authentic and the counterfeit.

• First published in America magazine
• Eryn Reyes Leong is an attorney, pursuing a master of theology degree at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Calif.

He would use her nickname, "Toots," or ask, "Hey, babe, how's your morning going?"

"I would give anything to hear that again," Rowell said.

But interacting with a version of a departed loved one is now more accessible than ever, thanks to generative language models such as ChatGPT.

Trained on a deceased relative's words — from a digital journal, videos or other content — a chatbot can reply to a prompt or question from a survivor with what it predicts the relative would say.

This might sound like the episode of the science-fiction series "Black Mirror" that explored a woman's use of technology to create a virtual version of her dead boyfriend, with disturbing implications.

But this is the very real way technology is helping people deal — or maybe not deal — with death.

Funeral homes are already adding AI powered obituary-writing services to the digital memorial webpages they create.

An interactive app, HereAfter AI, lets a user preserve photos and memories for family members to access after the user has died.

The Project December website offers to "simulate the dead" in a text-based conversation with anyone, "including someone who is no longer living."

In 2020, reality TV star Kim Kardashian even famously received a hologram of her late father wishing her a happy 40th birthday, a gift from her now ex-husband, rapper Kanye West.

Rowell, however, is unlikely to pursue any similar avenues.

"I don't think it would do me any good," said Rowell, who teaches the psychology of grief class in the mortuary science program at the University of Minnesota's medical school. "I think that it would open up a wound that at least has a pretty good cover on it."

The potential for new technology to intersect with age-old bereavement practices is growing nonetheless.

Rowell and others have advice on what to consider in creating a "chatbot of the dead."

Remember dignity, respect

Michael LuBrant, director of the U's mortuary science program, said the impulse to create a way to communicate with the dearly departed is part of human nature.

"There's no question that the idea of having ways to remember and memorialize and connect is, I think, something that's wired into our DNA," LuBrant said.

LuBrant, however, urges caution to families and funeral homes regarding chatbots. One concern is the degree to which survivors or others define the legacy of someone who has died.

"To what extent is any service offering that I would present to a survivor's next of kin, something that one would argue would demonstrate the highest degree of respect, dignity and concern for that individual who died in honouring their wishes and the wishes of the next of kin?" LuBrant said.

Curtis Funk, CEO of Tukios, a Utah-based software company serving funeral homes in Minnesota and across the country, said they would need roughly a month to complete a chatbot.

Tukios already offers an AI powered obituary writer and a content moderation tool for online guestbooks.

"People would love it, the way they listen to voice mails after someone's passed away or watch videos just to hear their voice," Funk said of such a chatbot.

"We're open-minded to building that into our suite."

But family members should decide whether to have a chatbot created and collect the content that goes into it.

"I don't think anything like that should ever be done without the family's approval," Funk said. "I think funeral directors all feel the same way." Continue reading

Now she is creating glass jewellery from her mother's ashes. Read more

But his mom still talks to him.

Sometimes Mandy Long speaks to her son, who died on Sept. 18, 2017, through prayer or in her journal. Other times she posts notes to her son on her family's Facebook group page, Crew's Crew.

"I think, for me, talking about Crew, saying his name, putting pictures out there and other people saying his name, I need that still," she said, speaking from the Indiana home she shares with her two older boys and husband, Scott. "It does help me. It does feed my soul to know other people are still thinking about him."

The interweaving of social media into our daily lives is changing the way we mourn our dead.

Grieving is no longer a private process, shared with just friends and family members during a wake or funeral. Today, we also reach out to our community of friends and family worldwide for solace on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter.

We may even mourn people we've never met — celebrities we watched on television as kids or favorite rock stars whose music marked points in our lives. This was the case recently when former "90210" TV star Luke Perry died. His Facebook page quickly filled with hundreds of mournful tributes, many of them speaking directly to him.

"The question at the time was why would you do that for a dead person?" said Glenn Sparks, who studies social media and mourning trends as a professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University. "Once we become attached to celebrity characters, and when they die and have funerals, we can't participate in the mourning events, and that's why many people join — to feel connected. There's a greater need to feel that we're part of that larger community."

Changes to social media policies also mean that our dead remain with us longer, at least online.

In 2014, Facebook changed its policies on the visibility of members' accounts after their deaths, making it easier for friends and family to share memories for a longer period of time on that person's page.

On Instagram, members have founded accounts such as @Griefstagram or @Griefcast to publicly document mourning or speak about death as a natural process and not something to be ashamed of or hide.

Kate George began @Griefstagram after her husband's death at age 32. In an essay posted on Medium.com, George said the couple had shared most of the details of their life together online.

So posting about his death, even though it was difficult, seemed the right thing to do, she wrote.

"I had been nervous about sharing the news of his death, and the cause, but the response to my post about Eric's death was overwhelmingly beautiful and celebratory of his life," she wrote. Continue reading

• Image: Highsnobriety

They chose the name Aryton after Formula One racing driver Ayrton Senna to reflect both Kyle's mad love for the sport and Danielle's Brazilian heritage.

They had a baby shower, filled drawers with baby clothes, decorated the nursery with a teddy bear theme with a night light and a mobile of pastel-coloured soft toys.

"I knew I had to put everything else on hold and focus on being the best mum I could be," Danielle says.

"We just had so much love to give … we wanted children to share in that love we had for each other — that was our definition of family."

Danielle had had a miscarriage before trying for Ayrton, but there was nothing to indicate any problems with him until she went into labour at nearly nine months and went to hospital in 2012.

"I was told his heart had stopped beating inside me," she says.

"In that moment, all the plans we had, the family we had dreamed of, disappeared.

"By that point I already thought of myself as a mother. All of sudden it was taken away from me and I was left with no baby to show the world. I lost my identity.

"The thought of not bringing my son home from the hospital had never entered my mind. I felt so confused, so lost, so alone, so hurt, so empty. It was like having an out-of-body experience."

The cause of Ayrton's death was inconclusive, leaving the parents without an explanation.

Different responses to grief

Grief travels at different speeds, especially within a couple when each side experiences loss differently.

Sands Australia, a national organisation that represents and supports parents who've experienced miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death, says there are two types of common grief — intuitive grief and instrumental grief:

• Intuitive grief responses encompass strong, affective reactions and waves of powerful emotion
• Instrumental grief responses are more inward, quiet processes, with less outward expression of emotions.

Sands Australia says often instrumental grievers express their grief by being physical and doing practical things.

In Danielle and Kyle's case, they responded separately, in each way. Continue reading

• Image: ABC

Now, some Peter's College students make film to honour friend.

Three of his closest friends, James Sutherland-Cameron, Oliver van Lent and Ned Drumm, have spent a month putting together the video, titled Robbie.

"How do we handle grief? What happens following the death of a dear friend? We hope you enjoy and find this film beneficial," they say.

Watch video

Scenes of the January crash set the scene, followed by video snippets and photos of the teen boys and interviews about their grief.

Sutherland-Cameron, an aspiring film-maker, said the film tackles the issue of road safety through the lens of their experience.

"There has been a lot of death on the road lately," he said. "Boys my age are still zooming down the road. You could be sitting in a car and someone zooms past you and it makes you think."

"But some people still aren't thinking."

"You aren't just in charge of your own life but the others around you," he said. "You are in charge of the car in front of you and the pedestrian in front of you, you know?

There were two other people in the car; a 20-year-old driver and a 19-year-old passenger.

"I guess I just feel what I feel for them, they loved Robbie as much as we did," Sutherland-Cameron said.

Source

• nzherald.co.nz
• Image: Screenshot YouTube

A man, who has name suppression, was convicted of Gotingco's rape and murder at the High Court in Auckland on Friday.

Gotingco went missing on a Saturday night in 2014 after catching a bus to her Birkdale home from her work in Auckland's city centre. Her body was found several days later at Eskdale Cemetery.

Gotingco family spokeswoman Ruth Money said the family was "celebrating Blessie's life as their faith allows."

"They're a very strong faith-based family and they have a very strong Filipino community around them, so they have New Zealand-based family as well as the international family who have arrived to support them through the trial, so there will be traditional Filipino and faith-based celebrations of her life and for her."

Blessie's husband Antonio Gotingco has spoken before about the family's strong Catholic faith.

Last year he said he believed everything happened for a reason, and that his wife's death was "an instrument to awaken the whole country that the environment is changing and that we need to start making an effort to protect our neighbours."

He acknowledged that faith in his only public words since the trial.

"May the grace of the Lord be with you all," he told media gathered outside Auckland's High Court on Friday.

After the trial, Money said the family were "extremely relieved" the trial was over.

"We wish to remember her for who she was rather than the evil that happened," she said.

"Her smile would light up your heart and will continue to do so."

Source

• Stuff.co.nz
• m.nzherald.co.nz
• Image: odt.co.nz

The youth and promise of the cricketing star, who was by all accounts an extremely likeable young man, was made much of in the media.

On the night he died, 3News reader Hilary Barry wore black as the bulletin led with the story of his "freak" death.

The next night viewers watched Australian cricket captain Michael Clarke break down several times while making a speech as he struggled time and again to regain composure, at one time to admonishing himself to "do your job" as he attempted to honour the star while announcing that Hughes' one-day international shirt number 64 had been retired.

It was difficult to watch and although it was a public announcement in front of the cameras, the captain's raw pain at the loss of his friend was laid out for all to see, the speech broadcast in its entirety with all the pregnant pauses and halting sobs left in.

One couldn't help but feel it was an intrusion on private grief.

And therein lies the problem with covering tragic deaths, of how far the media should go in the very public ownership of private grief, particularly when it has to report on the reaction of social media, which can make the Fourth Estate's coverage appear muted, dull, and emotionally inadequate.

A fan had posted a photograph of a cricket bat and cap laid next to a doorway as a mark of respect and the visual had gone viral, gathered momentum.

The #putoutyourbats hashtag on Twitter prompted cricketing greats to follow suit instantly, as television coverage faithfully recorded the lineup of bats and caps from around the world.

The tragedy-hysteria bus had left the station and there was some grief to be had.

The story of a cricketing great cut down his prime had caught fire and was gaining oxygen. Continue reading

• Jane Bowron in The Press

Jane Bowron is a columnist and TV reviewer.

It was 10 years ago on a dreary, damp, overcast Monday, around 1 p.m. in a windowless, bare, cinder block room just large enough for a king-size bed, a bedroom converted from a storeroom in a vending machine repair shop, in an aging industrial section of the west end of Tulsa, Okla., that our 26-year-old, beautiful, charming, loving, occasionally brilliant, multitalented, bipolar daughter found a hidden .22 caliber rifle, propped it up between the bedspring and the mattress, rested it on her chest, reached down, pulled the trigger, probably with her right thumb, and died instantly as the bullet ripped through her body, severing her aorta with what the medical examiner later described as a "perforating contact gunshot wound of the chest."

Our soul has been weeping ever since.

I miss her. Her mother and her twin brother miss her. We will always miss her. I want to always miss her. But I want to accept missing her. Someday I will. Her death still hurts, but it's getting better now.

At first, grief emotions attacked from everywhere. There was anger in my oatmeal, regret in the trees in my neighbor's backyard, depression drove my car to the grocery store, and frustration hijacked my dreams, my TV, treadmill and prayer. Continue reading

Sources

• Tom Smith in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Karla Smith Foundation

Tom Smith is president of the Karla Smith Foundation, supporting families affected by mental illness and suicide across the United States.

At times like these, philosophers are of limited use because when they have talked about dying they have tended to focus on what it means for the one who dies. Plato, for instance, called philosophy a preparation for death, while Epicurus told us we had nothing to fear from dying. But such thoughts are not much use to those who die suddenly. My father had seemed fit as a fiddle, but he was struck by a heart attack and died on the spot. The same happened to his brother and his brother-in-law, while his own father was killed instantly by a stroke. It is as though the Grim Reaper enjoys playing a cruel joke on those who look intently ahead. Those who prepare to meet him face-to-face are just as likely to find he sneaks up behind them and takes them unawares.

A much more useful philosophy would help us to prepare for the deaths of others. I have never been sure that philosophy does a good job of that. But perhaps a philosophical outlook can help us make sense of death when it comes close to us. Continue reading

Sources

• Julian Baggini in Aeon
• Image: U S Institute of Peace

Julian Baggini is a writer and founding editor of The Philosophers' Magazine.

The 33-year old was dying.

By the time his friends realised he was not joking, by the time paramedics navigated the stairs to the lecture theatre and by the time they got him to hospital, he was brain dead.

"They call it sudden adult death syndrome, where a seemingly perfectly fine young person drops dead," says his sister, Bronwen Fallens.

Eleven days later, Fallens and her mother made the decision to turn off his life support.

"We were lucky we got to be there. I held him in my arms as he passed and had his favourite music playing," she says.

The reactions of her friends to the death were varied, she says. Some rallied around her. Others made comments the 39-year-old says shocked and hurt her.

"Some people lose babies," one friend said.

"At least he got to 33."

Another friend compared the death to going through a divorce. Others said nothing at all.

"They're scared of catching it, your misery," Fallens says. "They think if they get too close to it, it will rub off on them. I ended up shedding the friends who couldn't understand."

Grief can be like having a mental illness, she says.

"I was in a world of misery. You're not yourself. Some people seem to think you should snap out of it and they judge you for grieving for so long."

When her father died with dementia a year later, aged 74, Fallens says she received an entirely different reaction. Some people didn't even send flowers or a card.

"It is as though you're not expected to be sad because he was old and sick and it was for the best, people say. But he was my father. I have lifelong memories of him from when I was a baby, long before he got sick." Continue reading

Sources

• Melissa Davey in Stuff
• Image: Tribework

Melissa Davey is a Sydney Morning Herald journalist