The Stupidest Place on Earth

 One of the accidental advantages of my birth was that I came into the world in South Florida in 1967, about the time that my dad, then a business reporter at the Miami Herald, was covering the unknown entity quietly buying up parcels of land in the center of the state. 

Disney World opened on October 1, 1971, in Bay Lake, Florida, adjacent to the cities of Orlando and Kissimee (kuh-SIM-mee), and set about making the non-coastal part of the state about much more than citrus farms, phosphate, and horse breeding. While it was still a relatively modest complex, no more than the original Magic Kingdom, my parents took my two sisters and me there twice -- once on a reporting job for which the Herald footed the bill, meaning that we got to stay in the upscale Polynesian Village Resort hotel, complete with a "waterfall" slide in the pool and kid-friendly drinks served in coconut halves.

As a result, it's always held a special place in the nostalgia region of my heart, even as it's grown and sprawled to the point that just the idea of visiting overwhelms me these days. But now it seems that the governor of Florida has made a move that is almost certain to backfire. For what appears to be sheer partisan cussedness, Ron DeSantis is looking the gift mouse in the mouth, and I can only hope that someone, or multiple someones, in Tallahassee come to their senses.

Florida’s state legislature passed a bill Thursday (April 21) revoking The Walt Disney Company’s control over its own self-governed district. Until now, that sort of Vatican City rule let Disney tend to sewer improvements, road repaving, and the like without having to go through municipal government -- in other words, without taking too long to get the repairs and upgrades completed. The bill turns over all that, as well as water and fire services, to Orange and Osceola counties. Along with a billion dollars in debt.

Why?

DeSantis swears that it's not retaliation. I call mouse poop. A month ago, the Florida legislature passed a bill that limited what public primary schools (kindergarten through third grade) could teach about gender and sexual orientation, stating that it had to be age- or developmentally appropriate. That sounds entirely reasonable, until you realize that it's so vaguely worded that it's now become widely known as the "Don't Say Gay" law. Disney's top mouse, Bob Chapek, responded to calls to help get it repealed. 

The bill is worded so squishily that parents already are wielding it to quash content or statements they dislike. In theory, Miss Jennifer with a picture on her desk of her wedding to Miss Courtney is disseminating content that is not age-appropriate. DeSantis promises that the bill dissolving the special district isn't retaliatory and won't hurt Florida taxpayers, but at the bill-signing ceremony he complained about "a corporation based in Burbank, California" using its economic oomph to "attack the parents of my state." 

Perhaps DeSantis has forgotten that every mile of Florida's coast (and there are many miles) draws the tourist dollars that power the state -- but that inland without Disney, and the many resulting theme parks and attractions surrounding it, would be (as noted) not much more than citrus farms, phosphate, and horse breeding. All of which are vital industries, but not the sort to encourage people to drive or fly many miles, book many hotel stays, and buy many souvenirs. 

More to the point, the "Don't Say Gay" law is a prime example of the difference between "I can't dance, it's against my religion" and, "You can't dance, it's against my religion."

I'm Not Dead Yet!

It's been a while since I posted to this blog. I knew that, but I didn't realize it had been ten months. 

Oops.

It appears that I made my last post a day or so before we moved from our temporary apartment to our house, built in 1930 in a historic neighborhood in the Tidewater region of Eastern Virginia. At the same time, I was experiencing some tension as a chaplain at the hospice where I worked, tension that ultimately led to me switching to a job I love at another hospice nearby. 

Between buying the house, relocating locally, and changing jobs, I did not know how long the blog had been dark. 

House lights down, stage lights up full. 

The recent animated movie Encanto, with songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, an award-winning composer, is full of catchy songs, as one would expect. Evidently the big earworm, particularly among the uner-10 set, is “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” focusing on what turns out to be just one of several family dysfunctions.

 

In the American culture at large, it’s not Bruno we refuse to talk about, but death. After seven years in nursing-home chaplaincy and roughly a year and a half in hospice chaplaincy, I’ve found that just about everyone I’ve encountered in those settings fits into one of a few categories.

 

Category A: The person nearest to actually dying – the resident or patient – is more than ready to talk about it. This person has ideas, if not an actual service, has definite opinions about the celebrant, the location, the music, and the mood. This person has family members – spouse, children, nearest living relatives – who are anything but ready to talk about it. No way, no how, no time.

 

Category B: The family members would like to discuss making plans with the resident or patient, if only to know if the person has a preference regarding cremation, cremation avoidance, organ donation, and disposition of the body in general. Ideally, the family members would like to encourage the resident or patient to participate in shaping the funeral or memorial service. (A funeral features a body in a casket. A memorial service features either a cremated body or no body at all.)

 

Category C: Neither the patient nor the family members want to talk about it. Period.

 

Category D: Both the patient and at least some of the family members are ready to talk about it.

 

Guess which category allows for the most healing and paves the way for the most restorative time of mourning and moving forward toward living with loss? That would be Category D.

 

In some cases, people in Category A and Category B might be subconsciously influenced by a superstition they can’t even name, much less acknowledge: that talking about death will hasten the end of life. The word “superstition” comes from the Latin stare (-stition), to stand, plus super, meaning “over.” The idea is that of standing over something, frozen in awe, but it also strikes me that some of the super means thinking that hovers above our conscious, linear, rational thinking. Something we pay homage to even as we are a little sheepish about doing so.

 

People sometimes have the same thinking about hospice care, not wanting to begin services, although that might be less superstition than misinformation, or uninformation. Hospice care is for when the patient has a terminal disease, with a prognosis of six months at most to live, and wants his or her life to end at home (or in a nursing home), with as much dignity, comfort, and autonomy as can be achieved.

 

Back to the discussion about death, and whether or not we talk about it, one of the (possibly unintended) results of not talking about it is the decline of funerals altogether. Whether it’s a funeral, a memorial service, or a celebration of life, choosing to do nothing at all is becoming increasingly popular.

 

Part of it, no doubt, is the increase in what the Pew Research Center calls “nones,” people who do not claim an affiliation with a house of faith. If ritual is not something that you normally engage in, it can feel artificial and even ghoulish to put on a service with your dead parent as the centerpiece. At the same time, the practice is a keystone of healthy grieving, of being able to live with the loss in a way that is healthy and whole. 

 

Part of it is most likely the statistical reality that many of the people dying now are part of the Silent Generation, and their reflexive inclination is: “I don’t want to be a bother.” Maybe they think that saying, “I don’t want a funeral” will lift a burden from their loved ones. They mean well. They’ve been trying to avoid being a bother most of their lives. But in doing so, they’re also depriving their loved ones of the opportunity to engage in one final act of love.

 

At the hospice service where I work, in the week before Easter (coincidence? Who knows), eleven people died. That’s a lot for one week. Four, just under half, chose to have no funeral or memorial service. And yet burial rituals are seemingly as old as humankind. People who study the very earliest human communities have found evidence of burials. St. Jean de Brebeuf, a Catholic missionary from France found people in the Huron-Wendat communities of North America uniting for a communal burial of the dead every ten years. This was in the early 1600s. 

 

Newly dead people were wrapped in beaver skins and placed on high wooden scaffolds. In preparation for the burial, women in the families were tasked with scraping clean the bones. Father Brebeuf saw one family do this with a corpse “oozing with decomposition.” Deeply moved, he called it “heartening” to see such “works of mercy.” (From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World in Search of the Good Death, by Caitlin Doughty.)

 

Not that I’m suggesting that we return to do-it-yourself defleshment. But the emotional reality is that doing nothing at all leaves a hole that never quite fills. If you are part of a family in categories A, B, or C, instead of choosing not to “talk about Bruno,” ponder this: At some point, you will be dead, and the people you love most will have to make decisions about what kind of ritual, if any, they will find to mark the passing of one person – one unique, wildly precious person – from their lives. You can participate in the discussion and let your loved ones know what you do, and do not, want. Otherwise, your loved ones are left to make guesses, or to honor your desire not to be a bother.