Kansas Senior Press Service Weekly Newsletters Kansas Senior Press Service Weekly Newsletters By Don Carter
Kansas Senior Press Service
It should surprise no one to learn that sunlight has therapeutic benefits. There is the vitamin D thing, warmth, and of course John Denver told us that “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy.” Look at any travel poster and you are not apt see people gamboling in the rain.
I have the privilege of serving with a municipal board of appeals, and in a recent meeting we received information about a health problem known as seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. SAD and its milder form, the “winter blues,” are caused by shortened exposure to daylight; thus, the incidence of SAD increases with latitude and weather conditions. Only 1.4 percent of people who live in Florida are affected, compared with 9.7 percent of New Hampshire dwellers.
SAD produces a host of problems generally related to malaise and depression. One of the remedies prescribed for SAD relief is light therapy—an increase in daily light exposure.
There are several theories as to why diminished sunlight is an issue in SAD: circadian rhythm, a physiological process that helps regulate our internal clock; melatonin, a sleep-related hormone that typically increases during longer winter nights; and serotonin, a brain-produced substance that influences mood (reduced sunlight reduces serotonin).
So how does this relate to aging-in-place homes with sunrooms. Whereas published information suggests that SAD is not simply a disease of older people, we are the ones less likely to spend winter days outside or escape to someplace sunny, and more likely to be homebound. Improve your home’s exposure to sunlight and, even when the availability is less, you can make the most of what’s there.
All manner of promotional literature is available from sunroom marketers and builders, but I speak as one who has a sunroom. We added ours piecemeal over three years to make it affordable. It sits over what was once a southwest patio, which means afternoon sun, and there is no room in the house that we enjoy more. We take meals there, and with patio furniture and house plants we feel like we’re outdoors, even in the heart of winter.
On a sunny day at the beach, you’re exposed to as much as 100,000 lux (the standard measure for light intensity). Your bedside lamp emits perhaps 100 lux, and ordinary office lighting between 500 and 700. Within my family, with age ranges from 19 to 67 years, as well as visitors, there is an unconscious and instinctive tendency to gravitate to the sunroom for every function. I guess it just feels more like we are at the beach.
Adding a sunroom is not cheap, but that’s why we did ours in stages. For less money, you can get some of the same benefits with skylights. Either improvement is at least partially recoverable when you sell the house, and in the meantime you have the joy and therapeutic value of sunshine. And that is an important component of aging in place.
1 Credit to It’s Winter Time—Lighten Up, by Lee Krenis More.
Don Carter is a licensed structural engineer and managing general partner of Foundation Engineering Specialists LLC, a company specializing in residential design and assessments: don@fdnengineering.com.
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Last December, Don Carter and his family entertained about a dozen people in their sunroom with no auxiliary heat, just solar gain from the southwest sun.
By Jim Rawdon
Kansas Senior Press Service
The envelope was yellowed with age. Stuffed inside were old newspaper death notices and obituaries passed out at funerals. One obituary slipped out and glided to the floor. It was for Grandpa’s grandmother.
I started to pitch it, thinking, “I can’t keep everything.” Then I thought, “This must be at least a hundred years old.”
After reading it, I shuddered at how much I could have learned about our family had I just asked questions of Dad and Grandpa, who had been gone for 10 and 25 years. Then, reading my great-great-grandmother’s obituary, I realized that old clippings could reveal family history I had neglected to ask about.
A century ago, newspaper obituaries provided detailed life histories. They were composed in flowery language that probably was meant to be consoling to survivors. Amaret Howes Rawdon, my great-great-grandmother, had few survivors. The obituary reported that her oldest son had been killed in a Civil War battle. Her next-oldest had died in a Confederate prison camp. Her third-oldest was killed the final week of the Civil War, after joining the Union army.
No wonder my great-grandfather, John Rawdon — her fourth son — had worked so hard to do something significant with his freedom and life. He had created the Rawdon Hotel, a four-story resort hotel in Oden, Mich. But I learned that wasn’t all.
A picture in a photo album showed a husband, wife, and two daughters, standing on a balcony. One of the girls held a baby in a blanket. A note from Grandpa in the album said that he was the baby, being held by his older sister, Lena.
For years, I assumed that the balcony was at the Rawdon Hotel. Later I remembered hearing that Grandpa was born in Carp Lake, Mich. So, while on vacation in northern Michigan, I located Carp Lake on the map and drove there.
At the post office, I told the postmistress I wanted some information about John Rawdon. Wide-eyed, she pointed to the wall and asked, “You mean that man?” There was a bronze plaque listing all the postmasters and postmistresses since the office opened in the late 1860s. Second on the list was John Day Rawdon, Carp Lake’s second postmaster, 1873–77.
But that wasn’t all. She pointed to a three-ring notebook on a window ledge and said, “That contains old pictures from Carp Lake.” I flipped through it and found a picture of a building with a balcony. Immediately I recognized it as the balcony in Grandpa’s picture, minus the girl with the blanketed baby. A note below the picture labeled it as The Wayside Inn.
On the wall of Elsie’s Restaurant, next door to the post office, hung a framed picture of The Wayside Inn. It was a resort hotel originally owned by John Rawdon, and it stood as a town landmark for nearly a century.
Intrigued by what I had discovered, I asked my neighbor whether she had ever learned anything about her family from old news clippings. She said she hadn’t, but would look through what she had. While looking for a newspaper obituary for her father, the first police chief in a little town, she ran across a copy of her grandfather’s obituary.
Jane’s grandparents owned a neighborhood bakery in St. Joseph, Mo. She said she grew up believing that their life running the bakery was hopelessly dull.
“They didn’t seem to have any friends,” Jane said. “All they ever did was work.”
She was partly right and completely wrong.
As I passed by the next day, she called for me to stop and showed me a copy of her grandfather’s obituary. “When I read this,” she said, “I cried.”
Her grandfather had operated his bakery in St. Joe for 62 years. He and his wife did work all the time, staying open from 6:00 a.m. till past 9:00 at night. The obituary told that a horse-watering trough fronted the shop in its early days. Children who had grown into parents and grandparents recalled puzzling over what penny candy to buy. For decades, students from Christian Brothers College a couple blocks away bought lunch there daily.
Said Jane, “I realize now that their friends were their customers.”
Another neighbor, Charla, shared that following a divorce, her finances were stretched to the limit. In a Watts, Okla., newspaper, she read about her Cherokee grandmother raising six children alone with a home garden and multiple odd jobs. Learning her grandmother’s story strengthened her belief that she could get by with less and still have a satisfying life.
If older relatives are still around, in assisted living or care centers, they can flesh out material for which you may now be custodian. But a lot of us don’t think to ask questions until it’s too late. That shoe box of old letters or those yellowed clippings scattered between the pages of a Bible may hold answers to questions about your family that you wish you had asked. They may also begin a trail of investigations and stories that will enrich your life and the lives of your own offspring.
Get up to your attic today!
Jim Rawdon is a retired pastor who lives in Parkville, Mo.
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Fred and Laura Stephan on the steps of their bakery in St. Joseph, Mo., mid-1950s.
Book explains practicalities of natural burial
This is the last in a two-part series on the increasing acceptance of “green,” or “natural,” burial.
By Joshua Slocum
Kansas Senior Press Service
I get a fair number of requests to write endorsements for books related to death and funerals, and I turn most of them down. Too many plow the same tired earth.
Mark Harris’ Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry (Scribner, 191 pages, $24) is a notable exception. Impeccably researched and concise, it’s the first book I know of to talk about the many practical ways Americans can get to the grave in a greener way.
Most importantly, Harris does what too few green-burial advocates do: He shows that being “green” isn’t a boutique political statement. It’s not confined to hard-core environmentalists and it’s not new. It’s a modern reawakening of old-fashioned frugality, common sense, and traditional American sentiments about family, community, and, sometimes, religion. In fact, I ought to stop calling it “green burial” and adopt Harris’ terminology: “natural burial.”
Harris’ book covers embalming, home funerals, modern corporate cemeteries, memorial reefs for ashes, and much more. Each chapter ends with a helpful, bulleted list of main points and where you can go on the Web to find out how to accomplish what the family profiled in each chapter did.
Natural burial, Harris says, “is for people who care about simplicity and tradition and having moving, personal funerals without spending a whole lot of money in the process.”
Joshua Slocum is executive director of the National Funeral Consumers Alliance.
Muslims and Jews are veterans of natural burial
Jews and Muslims have followed natural burial practices for thousands of years. Both groups trace their ancestry and burial customs to Abraham. Both are affiliated with cemeteries in the Kansas City area that long have provided various degrees of green burial.
In the following edited interviews, Cheryl Gold, president of the Greater Kansas City Jewish Burial Society, explains the practices of Orthodox Jews. And Mahnaz Shabbir relates how Islamic burial customs were observed after the death of her psychiatrist husband, Dr. Syed Farrukh Shabbir.
Gold: Orthodox Jewish burial should take place as quickly as possible after death, usually the same day or the next day. My mother passed away on a Friday morning and was buried by 2:00 p.m.
The body is not altered. We are very anti-cremation because it destroys the shell, the body that houses the soul given by God. We believe that when the Messiah comes, people will be resurrected. We remove rings, nail polish, makeup. We pour water over the body, making it clean and free of anything from this world.
The ideal is to be buried quickly in a simple white shroud, in a plain pine box with holes drilled into it. We advise people to take the money they would spend on a big fancy casket and give it to charity.
We don’t have a viewing. To go and stare at somebody’s body… they don’t look back at you. We remember them as they were in life. We visit the grave on various anniversaries, especially the death day. We pray for them for 11 months to help them transition into the next world.
Traditional Jews usually don’t do a lot of planning. Our emphasis is about living in this world, about life. But we believe in being informed.
Shabbir: The ideal for Muslims is to bury the same day if possible, or the next day. Family members wash the body. Males wash males and females wash females. Cleanliness is emphasized in the Islamic faith. Embalming is against our faith because if you inject embalming fluid, the body is not clean.
Then the body is wrapped in white cloth. Strips of fabric are used to tie the ankles together. The eyes are closed and the jaw is tied closed right after the time of death. An opening at one corner of the shroud allows family members to view the face and pay their respects. My husband was taken to Mt. Moriah & Freeman Funeral Home for washing and preparation. He was buried in Mt. Moriah Cemetery. We were able to do it without a coffin.
For Muslims, death is always present. Part of the tradition is that we don’t forget that we, too, will go one day. We have an obligation to attend funerals. When the body is taken to the cemetery, almost every male present will help carry it, if even for a few seconds.
At the grave site, our two oldest boys went down a ladder into the grave to receive their dad. They had formed a dirt pillow and placed him on the dirt with his head to the northeast. We had to sign a waiver that if anything happened to the boys, the cemetery was not responsible. The Imam prayed. The boys came out. Then a crane brought an inverted concrete grave liner and placed it over the body. Everyone was invited to put dirt into the grave.
Muslim funerals, with no embalming and no caskets, are less expensive than other funerals. The people at Mt. Moriah were very attuned and open. They found a way to meet our requests.
I have a friend who is a minister. After seeing our funeral, she realized she didn’t want to be embalmed.
Thanks to Steve Nicely and to the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Greater Kansas City for sharing this information. 816-561-6322 or www.funerals.org/KansasCity.
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Land being used for “natural burial” in Essex Way, England.
These articles are also available electronically at the Center on Aging Website: http://www2.kumc.edu/coa/Senior_Press_Article/Topic_Index.htm