Love & Community in New Orleans

Love & Community (ch 17)

• The majority of people reacted in disasters with generous improvisations, undergirded by communal memories.
• Solnit noted the kindness, love, and warmth of New Orleans, from affectionate greetings to open conversations.
• These connections are built on New Orleans as a loved place with low transience, promoting sociality and warmth.
• Community events like front porch gatherings and festivals reinforce social ties with pleasure and joy.
• Katrina fractured this long history of community through dispersal.
• The ability to evacuate depended on economic means, highlighting the challenge of returning for those who could not afford to leave.
• Concentric circles of response were witnessed through media, as anxiety turned into aid for some.
• Hurricanehousing.org facilitated nearly 200k volunteer rooms nationwide.
• Local people and communities rebuilt the community, with religion playing a part.
• Churches lent space to HCNA, becoming organizing partners.
• Rebuilding the community requires infrastructure, policy, and funds, but faces barriers leading to fracturing.
• In various circles of response, the audience is moved not just to anxiety but also to altruism and aid.
• Alongside a disastrous government response, numerous groups and people were activated into altruistic aid.
• Religious groups, including Catholic Charities, UMC, MDS, and Mary Queen of Vietnam Church played a significant role in the resurrection of New Orleans.
• Counterculture groups like the Black Panthers, Rainbow Family, and Anarchists also contributed.
• Smaller, radical groups were able to move faster and improvise responses to needs.
• Solnit highlights varieties of other responses, like racial justice and flourishing in alternative communities.
• Cindy Sheehan protested the Iraq War and moved her camp to Katrina.
• Veterans for Peace drove busloads of supplies to the Gulf Coast.
• Made with Love Café, the "hippie kitchen," provided food distribution and community.
• Malik Rahim & Common Ground organized for assistance and provided health clinics and door-to-door medics.
• Rainbow Family/Rainbow Gatherings partnered with Bastrop Christian Outreach Center for relief, providing food, a wall-less mart, and medical services.

Spontaneous Shrines (DRCW, ch 12)

• Grief repertoire refers to the common ways of responding to death and disaster.
• These ways of responding are culturally specific but are also part of a globalized culture.
• Altruism and aid involve getting involved and helping out to reaffirm social bonds and order.
• Acts range from volunteering to protesting, bringing meals, or giving hugs.
• Spontaneous shrines like the Princess Diana shrine are a way people show up after a death.
• New development in the repertoire includes a timeline of events.
• Mementos were left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial starting in 1982.
• Memorabilia was left outside Graceland after Elvis Presley's death in August 1979.
• Media coverage amplified both.
• Leaving mementos/messages gradually became part of public imagination.
• April 1989: Hillsborough soccer stadium tragedy prompted spontaneous acts in a church service.
• April 1995: Oklahoma City Bombing led to spontaneous acts by rescue workers and the public.
• August 1997: Princess Di's death resulted in huge media coverage.
• April 1999: Columbine High School shooting.
• November 1999: Collapse at Texas A&M University.
• September 2001: 9/11 attacks.
• Roadside crosses are a longer history of personal and family memorials, with vigils after shootings also common.
• AIDS Memorial Quilt is a different form, serving as a very large national effort.
• Characteristic elements include very individual and personal items, and also very typical things.
• Options for grief have a format set by media coverage.
• Religion/spirituality provides a repertoire of items like candles, crosses, rosaries, and Bible verses.
• Spaces become sacred from the surrounding area.
• Sacred spaces distinguish themselves with a focus on visitors' separateness.
• These spaces set up appropriate behaviors, thoughts, and feelings, and the care with which they are maintained.
• Cybermemorials are used differently than the Wall.
• Urban murals become a focus of community identity and can function as protest.

Hospice (ch 9)

• Medieval forerunners were monastic houses for pilgrims and the ill.
• Jeanne Garnier founded houses for the dying in Paris, New York, and Dublin from 1843-1899.
• Cicely Saunders (1918-2005, England) was a nurse and medical social worker.
• Saunders observed the painful suffering of terminal patients due to limited and paternalistic pain medication.
• David Tasma, a Polish Jewish cancer patient, and Saunders fell in love.
• Saunders trained at St Joseph's Hospice, a Sisters of Charity home for the dying and poor in East London.
• Saunders opened St Christopher's House in 1967, combining medical pain management and palliative expertise with holistic care.
• A patient at St Christopher's expressed feelings of calm and lack of upset in comparison to another hospital.
• Sanders stated you matter to the last moment of your life.
• Saunders sought a home away from home for the dying, contrasting with the cold medical establishment of the 1960s.
• She aimed to address total pain, which includes physical, emotional, social, and spiritual distress.
• Saunders spoke widely on these ideas, notably at Yale in 1965, influencing hospice approaches in the US.
• In 1970, the UK NIH funded hospice care.
• In 1974, Dr Florence Wald (Yale) founded Connecticut Hospice.
• Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's On Death and Dying sought to reimagine approaches to death.
• The first hospice unit in Canada opened in 1974 at St Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg.
• Dr. Balfour Mount developed palliative care in Canada, prioritizing a hospice-style approach in 1975.
• Palliative care actively comforts the terminally ill, managing symptoms, physical, and emotional needs.
• Palliative care is multidisciplinary, encompassing the patient, family, and community.
• Lakhta Hospice in St Petersburg opened in 1990.
• Dr. Anne Merriman opened Hospice Africa Uganda in 1993.
• The hospice model spread by personal connection.
• The US government reimbursed hospice expenses through Medicare in 1982, enabling the program to take off.
• Gaining funding folded hospice into an "industry," with increased advertising and recruiting.
• Hospice care is now normalized but not always utilized, implying acceptance of a terminal diagnosis.
• Core values of hospice include caring for pain among the dying, not attempting to cure.
• Pain relief includes the Brompton cocktail.
• Social pain/social death include community and family.
• There is holistic care through spiritual guidance.
• The hospice movement is medicalized, countering Bregman's assertion of "natural" death.
• It offers a compassionate, holistic response to total pain.
• It is NOT oriented to cure but rather to caring for and maximizing the dwindling life left.
• EuroAmerica views hospice as a chosen palliative and holistic option over cure-based approaches.
• In many contexts choice is not an option.
• Western-sponsored, Christian-based hospice in Uganda has potential colonial overtones.
• It transforms the focus of hospice.
• From medical care for pain it shifts to holistic compassion and teamwork in caring for the dying.
• Hospice addresses social context including upstream causes.
• Bregman suggests hospice comes down to (1) pain management and (2) WHO policy, cheaper than revolutionizing the medical system.
• Saunders engaged with euthanasia advocates.
• The text then leans into the debate over whether hospice is "death positive" or if it embraces a "natural death".
• This notion showed up strongly in the Death Awareness Movement and was amplified by Kübler-Ross.
• Saunders was not "death positive" but more "death ambivalent", seeing hospice as both a relief and an evil.
• Hospice gets championed as an alternative to medicalized/technologized death in hospitals.
• It fits a "low-tech, high touch" ethos of anti-institutionalism .

Death & Fear (LD ch 5 & Wiman's "Dying Into Life")

• Addressing emotions like fear, sorrow, loneliness, relief, rage, is necessary for broadly useful picture of a good dying.
• Albert Camus' fictional account of plague in Algeria offers insight into the pandemic.
• Susan Sontag's rage against her own mortality and anguished death.
• Christian Wiman's account explores negotiating fear in grandmother and great-aunt Sissy's deaths.
• People respond to fear in the face of death in two or three ways, beyond fight/flight.
• Responses: freezing, fawning, flopping, and annihilating.
• When what we fear is dying, the impulse to fight death is understandable.
• The metaphor of warfare and battle with death is highlighted with Susan Sontag's account in Illness As Metaphor.
• The ways we talk about disease have deeply impacted our cultural habits.
• "In her eyes, mortality seemed as unjust as murder" (96).
• This can spark desperation and rage, anger.
• Dylan Thomas' poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is referenced.
• Emotions are unavoidable when it comes to dying.
• Instinctual sympathetic nervous system responses address talk about death evoking a fight or flight response.
• Fear of death can strike another nerve in our brains and move to flight.
• Data from the state of Oregon's records of what individuals have chosen MAID.
• Some of the things needed as humans include physical safety, nurture, stability.
• When sickness threatens, we become homeless.
• The loss of self is a fear.
• Poet Christian Wiman writes out his experience of dying.
• The suggestion that a response to fear is to find a way not to "accept" a quiet resignation to complete annihilation, but to "die into life, not away from it," is made in the text.

Dying in Community

• Hauerwas responded that he would want to be surrounded by friends, at home but not in a hospital which contrasts with biomedical context
• Dying in a biomedical context isn't an isolated event and overresourcing of end-of-life crises takes up a disproportionate share of resources.
• Over-resourcing end-of-life crises is a way to outsource/replace communal care.
• North American society uses money to pay for "the best institutions" instead of communal care.
• Christian funerals perform a counterstory about the relationship between the community and the dying.

• Hauerwas points out that are all in this together

• Hauerwas says a good death, with friends, is more about learning to be powerless together, realizing God is here rather than trying to fix things
• Thoughts about funerals and prayer are rooted more in Christian tradition.
• You can start with stories of people facing death without community

Rituals (LD ch 8 & Lysaught)

• The chapter leans into the particularity of religious communities' practices and rituals around death.
• Rituals are orderly, tradition-based, formal performances that accompany our most profound events.
• NYT columnist David Brooks calls rituals a feature of the "social architecture that marks and defines life's phases."
• Brooks believes a ritual walks you through the inner change the new stage of life requires.
• Rituals engage community and provide time-tested scripts when unprecedented change comes along, "offers us a road map for what to do" at death (155).
• Rituals are concrete mechanisms through which social worlds give meaning and "fuller reality" to personal experiences.
• As Lysaught adds, these work together to promote values (or virtues).
• Religious traditions have long been in making order out of chaos but rituals are not limited to religious communities.
• Each social world develops its own ways of marking reality, its own repertoire of ready-to-use moves for special circumstances.
• On pulling the plug:
  • The head walks through you a sequence with an authority/ stock players
  • You establish volition, with individual choice. A freedom that gets performed
  • Limiting liability: saying you'll look but our hands are clean. Maybe they die.
  • Ritual offers good will
  • There's declaration with set parameters and cleanup
  • It's then compared to marriage
• There can be a loss in biomedicine rather then with death in religious communities
• Death is what comes from in traditions for communities with shared values
• Therese Lysaught's book talks about dying well

Spirituality, Religion & Death

• This discusses values and religious systems in connection with dying
• LD uses to press questions through death, and for death
• In this she discusses death for authenticity and personal commitment
• She talks about SBNR as some ways to have spirituality in the US
• Wiman looks different on this with different angles

LD, Dying & Bodies

• It looks at facing regular deaths by vulnerabilities
• The dancing body describes pandemic with an acute instance that people danced till they broke

Ethics & Ends of Life

• This is about death and how bioethical discussion arises
• She bookmarks these for things often lean that way
• It talks often about different religions
• Negative and positive of positive rights

Five stages of death

• In 1969 it was a tide-change in how to talk about death but overdone
• KR provided frame for cope with dying
• KR observed in that time terminally ill where bad

What is a Bucket List

• We think "If made a bucket list, put on in"
• Complicates list cause it's dashed
• It does push a dark question before death

I hope these study notes are helpful. Let me know if you need anything else.