For many boomers, dying part of living

James Love, an Internet writer and publisher, has created the Baby Boomer Death Counter. Every 50 seconds, the real-time counter subtracts a life. So far, 7.6 percent of all boomers (those people born in the U.S. between 1946 and 1964) have died.

This past month our editorial board interviewed opponents and proponents of the so-called Death with Dignity Act. These discussions led me to research trends that are emerging in death and dying for the boomer population. Seventy million boomers are still alive, so it’s too early to know whether boomers – who challenged and changed every milestone they milestoned through – will do the same for the final one. As boomers count down life’s time clock, look for:

“Neighborhood hospice houses.

At the newly opened Hospice House in Spokane, friends and family members of the dying can stay at a loved one’s bedside 24 hours a day. The rooms feel like cozy hotel suites. When people die, they are not ushered down back halls or whisked away in service elevators.

“They are covered with a quilt, taken to a reflection room and the staff does a blessing of the body,” explained Ann Hurst, chaplain manager for Hospice of Spokane. “Family members are encouraged to stay, but we do it even if they are not there. Other residents see it. It’s not hidden.”

Like their parents and grandparents, most boomers will prefer to die at home, rather than in hospitals and nursing homes. This will be even harder for boomers, because families are smaller and scattered geographically, and in-home health care will be at a premium as boomers age. Hospice houses, which offer home-like settings and compassionate care, will evolve into the compromise. Expect to see more of them built in the Inland Northwest and throughout the country.

“Holistic hospitals.

People who die in hospitals are not surrounded by machines or protected against visitors as much as they once were. Some medical centers have special rooms for the dying that encourage 24-hour family vigils and offer soothing lighting and minimal medical interruption. Harpists play music to the dying in an emerging specialty known as music thanatology which is being studied now for its effectiveness in lessening pain and agitation.

In hospitals, “you still find cases where they don’t want families in there – two people at a time only,” Hurst says, but she believes boomers will protest and insist that hospitals change their systems.

“Organic rituals.

The boomers who went organic in life will desire the same in death. In her book “Here If You Need Me,” Kate Braestrup, chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, describes how she and four others bathed her husband’s body and dressed him in his state patrol uniform. “We cried the whole time we did it, when we weren’t laughing,” she writes. “It was important, and it was lovely.”

Expect to see more “green burials,” in which bodies are not embalmed or placed in caskets and vaults but shrouded in biodegradable materials and put to rest in natural settings in so-called eco-cemeteries.

“Death denial.

This trend worries Hurst and me, too. There are boomers who refuse to hold vigil with their dying parents, because they say they don’t want to remember them “that way.” Some boomers insist that no memorial services be held for them when they die. Both actions deny death and short-circuit the grieving process.

“Ritual serves a very important process,” Hurst explains. “It makes the death concrete and helps the grieving process. We don’t want people to be sad. We want to gloss it over. But it doesn’t allow survivors to do their grief. And if they don’t do it now, it will come back later as unmourned losses.”

To reach mature adulthood, no matter our ages, we must work through difficult and painful emotions. Those who have been privileged to hold vigil at a dying person’s bedside and honor that person’s life at a daylong memorial celebration understand how joy and sweetness surface through the sorrow.

In the past 24 hours, 1,720 boomers have died, according to Love’s death counter. Still just 7 percent. Thank goodness we boomers have some more time to finally get it right.