Body recovered from ocean off Dhilba Guuranda-Innes national park on the Yorke Peninsula
A teenage boy has died after a shark attack near Ethel Beach in South Australia, police say.
At 1.30pm on Thursday police received reports of a shark attack in Dhilba Guuranda-Innes national park, on the Yorke Peninsula.
Continue reading...Royal Life Saving Society chief says Australians may not be ‘as strong swimmers as we believe’ as December toll hits 22
Another person has drowned in New South Wales, adding to the rising drowning death toll that has prompted a warning from lifesavers at what is considered the deadliest time of year.
Four people were pulled from the water at Port Stephens on Wednesday afternoon, including a 33-year-old man who could not be revived and died at the scene.
Continue reading...YouGov finds 77% in favour of proposal to allow terminally-ill people to take their own lives
A large majority of Scottish voters support proposals to allow terminally-ill people to take their own lives, according to a poll released by campaigners for assisted dying laws.
A new bill to legalise assisted dying in Scotland is due to be published by the Scottish parliament later this year, in a fresh attempt by its supporters to get the measure enacted for the first time in the UK.
Continue reading...With a lower carbon footprint than gas-fired cremation, the process is described as ‘gentler on the body and kinder on the environment’
For anyone uneasy at the thought of their body being consumed by flames or interred in an insect-teeming grave, a new funeral choice is about to become available: water cremation.
The process of dissolving a body in a bag in 160C water treated with an alkali will become available in the UK from this week – the first new legal method of disposing of cadavers since the Cremation Act of 1902. It has been described as a “boil in the bag” funeral.
Continue reading...Queen’s funeral credited for hymns’ revival while Time to Say Goodbye replaces You’ll Never Walk Alone at No 1
Hymns are back among the most popular funeral songs, boosted by the queen’s funeral, while the Monty Python song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life has slipped out of the top 10, funeral directors have said.
All Things Bright and Beautiful and Abide With Me are the first hymns in the top 10 for seven years, in the Co-op Funeralcare chart based on song selections at about 93,000 funerals.
Continue reading...Megan Hess and her mother Shirley Koch defrauded distraught families and dismembered bodies for illegal sale
A former Colorado funeral home owner was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison on Tuesday for defrauding relatives of the dead by dissecting 560 corpses and selling body parts without permission.
Megan Hess, 46, pleaded guilty to fraud in July. She operated a funeral home, Sunset Mesa, and a body parts entity, Donor Services, from the same building in Montrose, Colorado. The 20-year term was the maximum allowed under law.
Continue reading...State becomes sixth to pass legislation since 2019 and gives New Yorkers access to an alternative, green method of burial
New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, on Saturday legalized natural organic reduction, popularly known as human composting or terramation, after death.
The legislative move makes the state the sixth to do so since 2019 and gives New Yorkers access to an alternative, green method of burial deemed environmentally friendly.
Continue reading...The state is the fifth to legalize the environmentally-friendly process which allows for the natural reduction of human remains to soil
California lawmakers have approved a new way of returning those who have died to the earth, after Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill allowing human composting on Sunday.
Cremation, which accounts for more than half of burials, is an energy-intensive process that emits chemicals like CO2 into the air. Through human composting, or natural organic reduction (NOR), the body is naturally broken down into soil.
Continue reading...More than 80% of the country’s Covid deaths occurred in 2022, likely in part due to success of early control measures but questions remain
Behind the daily death figures, there is a more complicated picture of the impact of Covid-19 in Australia that raises questions about whether Covid could be causing more deaths from ischaemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease and dementia.
As cases exploded after the emergence of the Omicron variant, the number of Covid deaths similarly rose, with more than 80% of Australia’s total Covid deaths occurring in 2022.
Continue reading...Lawyers had requested that 12-year-old be moved from Royal London hospital to spend his last moments in private
A ruling on whether 12-year-old Archie Battersbee can be moved from hospital to a hospice to die is expected at the high court on Friday morning.
Lawyers for the boy’s family took part in an hours-long legal hearing on Thursday, with the court in London sitting until late in the evening.
Continue reading...As Graham Mansfield is found not guilty of murder for killing his terminally ill wife, Dyanne, we look at key assisted-dying debates
Graham Mansfield was found not guilty of murder after cutting his wife’s throat “in an act of love” before trying to kill himself, after a judge accepted the couple had made a suicide pact.
It took just 90 minutes for a jury to clear Mansfield, 73, from Hale in Greater Manchester, of the charge after he gave an emotional testimony of how he had killed his wife, Dyanne, because she was in such pain with terminal cancer.
An assisted-dying law would imply it was something everyone elderly, seriously ill or disabled “ought” to consider.
No safeguard could ensure decisions are truly voluntary.
Society should instead ensure palliative care is available to all.
A doctor’s role is not to deliberately bring about a patient’s death.
Palliative care can’t relieve all pain and distress.
Physician-assisted dying is legal for more than 150 million people around the world, with eligibility criteria, safeguards and regulation in place.
End-of-life practices are legal in the UK. The same safeguards could be used in assisted-dying legislation.
The current law is not working, with UK citizens travelling to facilities such as Dignitas in Switzerland. But they need to be well enough to travel, meaning they often end their lives sooner than they would have wished.
Continue reading...Campaigner says death is ‘life’s last taboo’ and that she hopes talking about may bring comfort to others
Deborah James has said she is angry at the fact she is terminally ill, and scared of dying.
The campaigner, 40, who was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2016 and has documented her experiences since on social media, revealed that in the weeks since moving to end-of-life care she keeps “shouting at people and pushing them away”.
Continue reading...Scientists report unexpected brain activity in patient, 87, as he died from heart attack
When Harry Stamper sets off a bomb to save planet Earth in the film Armageddon, his life flashes before his eyes. Now research has revealed tantalising clues that such recall may not be Hollywood hyperbole.
An international team of scientists has reported an unexpected situation in which they recorded the brain activity of an 87-year-old patient as he died.
Continue reading...Last wishes have gone unfulfilled, families been kept distant – the pandemic has made death a lonely experience. For carers, it’s underlined the value of a good death
Rachel Coghlan first witnessed death as a four-year-old when she watched her grandfather collapse and die in front of her. Later, as a physiotherapy student working as a carer in a nursing home, she found a woman dead in her bed. A nurse taught her not to recoil and instead showed her how to bathe and dress the body.
Later again, working as a physiotherapist in London, she watched as a man from Sudan struggled to weigh up a diabolical choice between staying in the UK to access treatment, or returning home to his family but with no prospect of healthcare. He chose his family.
Continue reading...Actor uses National Theatre tribute event to talk publicly for first time about wife, who died of cancer
Damian Lewis has spoken publicly for the first time about the loss of his wife, Helen McCrory, who died last year from breast cancer aged 52.
During an evening of poetry dedicated to McCrory at the National Theatre, Lewis paid tribute to the “one person whose thunder would absolutely not be stolen”.
Continue reading...It was a regular family home – just one in which I learned not to run around the garden when the funeral processions passed, and to jump over, never on, any bluish grey powder I might find
When I was eight, roller skates were things you stepped into while wearing your outdoor shoes. They had laced, red leather toe-pieces that you pushed your shoes into, and red straps to buckle round your ankles. Two chunky black wheels sat either side of your toes, and two either side of your ankles. The metal base could be shortened or lengthened as needed. The skates made a loud clacking noise and didn’t roll well on -carpets or bumpy -pavements. If my sister and I were to build up any momentum at all, there was only one place to go. Down the crem.
The crematory was cavernous. The clackclackroll of skates was loud on the tiled floor, which was cold and hard to fall on, but goodness, you could pick up some speed. On the other side of the immense wall was the chapel. We knew that during the day coffins came through one hatch and were rolled across to three steel ones on the opposite side: cremators 1, 2 and 3. But we only went down the crem – as we all called it – when the room was still and the furnaces empty and cold. Each cremator had a small, nautical-style wheel that, when spun, opened the doors on to the scorched bricks of the incinerators. These wheels were handy to grab hold of when we needed to slow down. Occasionally, we’d spin one to see inside. My sister climbed in once, and her trousers were never the same again.
Continue reading...The anti-apartheid hero requested an eco-friendly cremation, which uses water instead of flames to process the remains
The body of Archbishop Desmond Tutu will undergo aquamation, an increasingly popular and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional cremation methods, using water instead of fire.
With aquamation, or “alkaline hydrolysis”, the body of the deceased is immersed for three to four hours in a mixture of water and a strong alkali, such as potassium hydroxide, in a pressurised metal cylinder and heated to around 150C.
Continue reading...Our 20 favourite pieces of the year
After growing up in a Zimbabwe convulsed by the legacy of colonialism, when I got to Oxford I realised how many British people still failed to see how empire had shaped lives like mine – as well as their own
Continue reading...Son writes loving and unusual 1,000-word tribute to Renay Mandel Corren, who died in El Paso, Texas at age 84
Some obituary notices open with the grand achievements of a life well-lived, or the tender details of a person’s passing with loved ones at their side. The death in El Paso, Texas, of Renay Mandel Corren, however, was marked in somewhat more unorthodox fashion. “The bawdy, fertile, redheaded matriarch of a sprawling Jewish-Mexican-Redneck American family has kicked it,” it read.
According to the family’s obituary published in the Fayetteville Observer, Corren, who died on Saturday at the age of 84, will be mourned “in the many glamorous locales she went bankrupt”.
Continue reading...Modern society has largely exiled death to the outskirts of existence, but Covid-19 has forced us all to confront it. Our relationship to the planet, each other and time itself can never be the same again
We have been asked to write about the future, the afterlife of the pandemic, but the future can never be told. This at least was the view of the economist John Maynard Keynes, who was commissioned to edit a series of essays for the Guardian in 1921, as the world was rebuilding after the first world war. The future is “fluctuating, vague and uncertain”, he wrote later, at a time when the mass unemployment of the 1930s had upended all confidence, the first stage on a road to international disaster that could, and could not, be foreseen. “The senses in which I am using the term [uncertain],” he said, “is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest 20 years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth-owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.”
This may always be the case, but the pandemic has brought this truth so brutally into our lives that it threatens to crush the best hopes of the heart, which always look beyond the present. We are being robbed of the illusion that we can predict what will happen in the space of a second, a minute, an hour or a day. From one moment to the next, the pandemic seems to turn and point its finger at anyone, even at those who believed they were safely immune. The distribution of the virus and vaccination programme in different countries has been cruelly unequal, but as long as Covid remains a global presence, waves of increasing severity will be possible anywhere and at any moment in time. The most deadly pandemic of the 20th century, the Spanish flu at the end of the first world war, went through wave after wave and lasted for nearly four years. Across the world, people are desperate to feel they have turned a corner, that an end is in sight, only to be faced with a future that seems to be retreating like a vanishing horizon, a shadow, a blur. Nobody knows, with any degree of confidence, what will happen next. Anyone claiming to do so is a fraud.
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