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RSSCarnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, co-author of The Last Lecture, appeared on many national news programs during his final months. He accumulated more fame and fans than in his previous 47 years. He also demonstrated palpable new paradigms for living large in the dying process.
Boomers have often visited death throughout life, beginning with 58,000 fatalities in Vietnam. In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, an eminent psychiatrist, published a bellwether book titled On Death and Dying. Her influential tome elucidated psychological adaption to the final journey. She brought death out of the closet, and her ideas continue to influence the future. How so?
Anticipate meteoric growth for hospice services in the next few decades. Hospice provides palliative care for those diagnosed with terminal illnesses. Services include pain control, nursing care and spiritual counsel. Many prefer this pathway to eternity over "death by technology."
An emerging trend is "slow medicine," in which those confronting difficult medical choices slow down the process to assess fully the restorative potential of yet another medical procedure. Life-prolonging medical intervention has its value when the outcome allows greater life quality if not extension of time remaining, but when medical procedures only promote more pain and weakness without recovery, then many Boomers will put the brakes on "heroic medicine."
Healthcare policymakers and marketers can expect this generation to test inflexible traditions that reduce the fullest possible expression of life experiences during final months and weeks. Like Dr. Pausch, many Boomers will make their concluding days as meaningful as possible by recording and preserving their legacies. This will lead to dramatic growth of personal historians and online resources for those with terminal diseases to "upload" life experiences, values, philosophies, photographs, videos, insights and hopes for humanity.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have isolated the psychoactive compound in the hallucinogenic mushroom psilocybin, one of the drugs some Boomers experimented with during the sixties. Researchers have tested the synthesized medication on adults who have never experimented with recreational drugs.
In various studies, those who took the synthesized hallucinogen have reported experiencing some of the most profound spiritual events of their lives. Someday, hospices and nursing homes may offer psilocybin or other mind-altering medications for patients seeking divine experiences but are unable to get to this state of consciousness through prayer or meditation.
Over half of those who die in another 20 years will choose cremation. This will have considerable impact on the funeral and cemetery industries. Some Boomers will have their carbon ashes compressed into synthetic diamonds. Others will choose "green" cemeteries, in effect becoming "Dust in the Wind," where remains are buried on public land and inside cardboard boxes with only GPS coordinates for grave markers. Others will choose to have their cremains buried offshore in artificial reefs.
We can expect Boomers to transform the final stage of life with as much creativity as they've changed the nature of being a teenager, a middle-aged adult and now a grandparent. They will embellish the dying process with new customs that allow people to reach the conclusion of life with meaning, dignity and grace.
The final slide of my presentation to a gathering of hospice leaders revealed a graying Boomer man holding a protest sign, hearkening back to the Sixties and a time of strident protest marches. He brandished one possible concluding aphorism for this generation: "Die the way you lived."
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Boomers are not interested in the old ways - rightly so, they have become ugly and meaningless to our eyes and spirit. We need meaningful and attractive new ways to leave memorials for family and future humanity, ways that align with contemporary aesthetics and ethical values. This must be wisely done, and not merely reactionary, as for example the more extreme "green burial" proposals are. A human life is not only about its environmental impact. A tree as a memorial is a good start to a new vision but there are issues here too. Firstly personality - a tree, though beautiful, is generic, has no connection with a specific person. And as for GPS markers instead of old-fashioned rock - does Windows 98 still work on your computer, just 10 years later? Come on! Not everything has a purely technological solution. This is naivety.
New places of memory and tribute also need to remain undisturbed forever. A forest or a tree alone as memorial, however beautiful and therapeutic, is no less mortal than anyone of us. A forest fire, disease, human intervention WILL ultimately kill it. We should be thinking more intelligently about combining these environmentally positive solutions with genuine and perpetual memorials. Why not use an engraved fieldstone below the tree to register and remember who is buried there? When the tree dies, which it will, the stone will remain in the forest. Even if the forest is somehow lost, the memory remains in the stone.
Visit Perpetua's Garden for other ideas and discussion.
Thomas Friese http://perpetuasgarden.org