The interesting online journal Music and Arts in Action, from the University of Exeter recently had a special issue on Music and the Arts in Health and Wellbeing. This inlcudes a long artucle on the St Christopher’s Schools Project, a public education project that helps children to be more in touch with death and dying; it also has a good piece on arts work with people with dementia.

http://musicandartsinaction.net/index.php/maia/index

A  picture reflecting life and death, from a photography blog:

http://www.mymodernmet.com/photo/photo/show?id=2100445%3APhoto%3A317375

A trip to Teesside University (the geographically challenged will find Middlesbrough on a map in the top right-hand corner of England about equidistant along the coast between Hull and Newcastle, but the local authority so named seems to have disappeared) to work on a project.

I find on arrival that Teesside University is trumpeting the fact that it is the Times Higher Education magazine’s university of the year, an award that I imagine must have put noses out of joint in some sniffier universities down south. Arriving in the evening, I find that the multi-coloured lighting that public buildings go in for nowadays (at what cost to the environment, I ask myself?) suggests that the X-files people should be called out to investigate a giant alien spaceship landed in the middle of a car park wasteland. The following morning, I realise that this prestige building sits in multiple buildings of more prosaic education architecture thrown up over the decades of administrative metamorphosis from technical and teacher training college to university of the year. The campus is, indeed, in its lack of beauty another challenge to the environmentally concerned.
They have been developing social and health care education in end-of-life care and there is a doctor, Edwin Pugh, who has produced an interesting paper, based on his professorial lecture, on achieving a good death (or what trendier sociologists are calling ‘dying well’). From this I am reminded that memento mori are medieval symbolic pictures of skulls and the like to remind us that fleeting and precious life will necessarily lead to death. And that ars moriendi refers to the art of dying well. I do like a bit of Latin in a blog.
Margaret Holloway, who writes the introduction to this paper suggests that we should see end-of-life care as delivering services ‘artfully’.
My grandmother would not have regarded being artful as a compliment; she saw it as deviousness. But I take the point that dealing with the complexities of the dying process in a family requires input from many arts, human and scientific. And the way today’s society is set up does not make it any easier.
The paper: Pugh, E. (2008) Memento Mori: Personal reflections on achieving a good death in today’s society. Middlesbrough: School of Health and Social Care, Teesside University. (Occasional Paper No 1.) available from Maria Morrissey, Project Officer (Enterprise), Senior Management Support Office, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, Tees Valley. TS1 3BA UK.
T: +44 (0)1642 738063; F: +44 (0)1642 384995

A correspondent through my Google profile (http://www.google.com/profiles/malcolmpayne.payne734#about) which gets you to other things about me on the www, points me at a relevant publication.

The Friend, the Quakers’ magazine, has a recent (19^th March) edition on dying, including stuff on assisted dying, and a lot of material is available free on the internet. There are two features about the arts, including an interesting schools project illustrated by two quilts, and a choreography project, Soul Play, based on personal experience, which has gained a lot of attention and played at some important theatres.

Choreography project at: http://www.kateflatt.com/

Interestingly for a Christian website (usually against assisted dying), the assisted dying feature in this edition is from Dignity in Dying (the organisation on favour of changing the law) and does not seem to have an answer from people with alternative views. It rehashes their views; one of the issues here is that their assumption is that because the majority is in favour of assisted dying our legislators are being dinosaurs in obstructing its natural progress. The Quakers deserved a more thoughtful and balanced coverage in their magazine because the majority is only partly in favour with many limitations. Also if all the practical difficulties saw the light of day in the passage of legislation, there might be a change of mind.

The assisted dying feature:

http://thefriend.org/article/the-greatest-campaign-of-the-twenty-first-century/

The Friend magazine on the internet at : http://thefriend.org/magazine