HW 49 - Comments on Best of Your Break HW

Amber,
I think they way you went about this interview was interesting, and there was clearly a lot of work put into it. You took careful notes on what the people were saying and you really payed attention to what caught your interest. You make interesting points about how the christian people weren't sure about whether not they wanted to be cremated. I think that is important to observe the way people with religious differences view the care of the dead. One of the things i would change about this is that you seemed focused on one topic, but i felt like it was too broad. You made remarks about religion and cremation, but you didn't go too in-depth on it. I feel if you took what these people said and was able to take your own personal bias out of it and see how different ideas can all revolve around the same basic concept and maybe see how these people can get these different ideas, then this would have been a lot more insightful. But i did honestly enjoy reading this. Good blog post Amber.
Sam

Kevin,
To start i think that you had some great ideas. I really like the ideas that you present about funerals being about celebrating a person's life and that it isn't always necessary to spend an absurd amount of money on someone's funeral. I also agree with you that having a funeral for them so they have a proper start to their afterlife is not a sufficient reason for an extravagant funeral. I think that if you expanded on these ideas then you would have a really great blog post. Why do you disagree with Mike, and why did his ideas make you mad? What influences do your religious beliefs play in your opinions? I think that if you went in depth in the "My Thoughts" section, then maybe we (the readers) would understand where your stronger opinions were coming from. Other then that though i think you had some great ideas. Good job.
Sam

Martyna,
I can't help but say i was impressed by reading your blog. I think that the amount of work that you put in to this post is very well reflected to the readers. I really like how you were able to understand that you have a somewhat biased point of view because of the way you were raised and how you were able to post the answers to your questions seemingly without bias. I particularly liked how well spoken your parents seem, they seem very down to earth about their answers. They understand the traditions set by their religion such as the church ceremonies and mourning the dead, and they also understand how weird these traditions can be. I don't really have any suggestions for you because i really did enjoy this post.
Sam

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Sam,
Your post is very well organized. It is clear who you interviewed and what questions you asked. You present your parents' statements and connect them to your own opinions.
In a way, I think I would have a similar attitude to your father's - I don't want to think about what happens to me after I die, because I am scared of the idea itself, therefore I understand why your dad was not completely serious about it.
I like that you included your hypothesis at the end. This shows that not only did you ask questions and listen to the answers, but you also made your own conclusions based on what you found out from your interviewees.
There were a few parts where I got a bit confused by the wording (especially in the first sentence), but I managed to make sense of everything at the end. Thank you for sharing your interviews :)
Martyna

Mother (Mentor)
Death and dying is never an easy topic to rationalize, especially for a young person who has so much in front of them. To see a parent lose a parent is an eye opening experience - to see them grieve has to be an unsettling experience to say the least. I feel this posting is an insightful observation to some profound real life experiences, which may also set a path for them in the future. Respect in life and death, acceptance of religious observation, and an understanding that in the end death is part of life is a huge notion to grasp. this is an outstanding step in that direction.

Eli (protege)
Summarizing someone's thoughts is no easy task when it is such deep context as that of their thoughts of death. I was there for your interview with both parents and I must say your journalism was not only accurate but efficent. Considering neither parent gave straight answers, I am impressed with what you took from almost nothing.

Once again your ideas are original and fascinating. Of course your thoughts could be better organized but I almost like how relaxed your writing is, I feel like your explaining it to me.

Overall this does open up my mind. It does what writing sets out to do, to make one think. Nice job.

Kevin W. said...

I liked the way this post was structured, and the quotes you chose had a lot of meaning. I think you used the information that your parents provided you to create a viable hypothesis. I agree with what you said by it not being the body that matters, it being the "soul", however people think of that. I'm glad you mentioned religion deciding how someone gets cared for because from my experiences that came up a lot.
A suggestion about the way you structured this post would be to switch the order in which you included the interviews because you put the more interesting information at the beginning which took away from the post. Save the best for last. Also in the middle of the post your wording started to get confusing. I think you did a good job of making something out of the little information you got from your parents. I think it's always hard to draw conclusions from little bits of information and you did it well.

Sam,
The way you took on this assignment was interesting. You had a couple of quotes in there which helped me understand how your parents approached such questions. It was interesting to compare the responses your mother gave you to what your father gave you. Your mother isn’t as attached to her religious beliefs as much as your father. Because your mother isn’t really religious, all she cares about is her remembrance after her death. Your father does not have a set plan about how he wants his body to be cared for after his death. I like how you were honest throughout your post; your father didn’t seem to have much of a say on the topic. I feel as if many of us are afraid to think of death related issues; it is not something many of us like to discuss, take your father for example. I am sure when you approached your father with such questions he must have felt a bit uneasy; this can be concluded from the vague responses he gave you. Overall good job, I like how you stated your hypothesis towards the end.
Amber M.

HW 48 - Family Perspectives on the Care of the Dead (Comment on this one)

Both of my parents have a parent who has died, one was cremated and one was buried in a very traditional manner. Neither side of the family is particularly religious, but one side embraced religion and the other rejected it, so I felt it would be interesting to compare the two.

First I interviewed my mother, I asked her about her views and opinions on death.

"I feel there is an ashes to ashes aspect to life"

"Sometimes when you go to the cemeteries and you look at the headstones, they give these little snippets of life, and they are truly fascinated."

I always knew my mom wanted to be cremated, just like she knew that her mother always wanted to be cremated. But what she has always been very clear about is that she wants to be one with the earth when she dies, but she wants to be remembered. Whether it is by a stone that tells her life in a sentence, or by a plaque on our deck on Fire Island. She wants to be remembered in writing, I understand that. She doesn't care about the religious aspect of her burial or what form it takes, but she just wants to be remembered.

I feel that this makes a huge impression in what I believed in, which is that people are very superstitious about death, and more importantly, life. The way my mother describes it, is that we just want to be appreciated and respected in life and in death. It is more taboo to say bad things or disrespect a dead person because they can't defend themselves. So I understand that my mother wants to be buried in a way that people who don't know her will see this quick summary and know that she was a good person and that her time on earth wasn't "wasted."

Then I interviewed my father and asked his opinions about his views and opinions on death.

First I must explain that I do not have any quotes from my father because in his interview he did not actually say anything that i felt was that quotable. Though it was what he didn't say that was so important. He didn't take it completely serious, but he did answer my questions. He didn't know if he wanted to be buried or cremated. He did know that he didn't care how many people came to his funeral because he was dead so "who cares." When I first asked him what he wants to happen to him when he died, he said that he wanted to be buried in a Jewish cemetery because he is Jewish and he believes that it is the right thing for him to do.

By looking at how undecided my dad was about his "plans," I could tell that he is more then just undecided, he is somewhat scared. Dying is a pretty big deal and it isn't something that you can just come to terms with at the drop of a hat. A lot of people like to be able to arrange everything about how they will be cared for before they die, and others just die and hope for the best. I believe that it comes to you like an epiphany, that you know what feels right, and you can't rush that. The significance of all this is that it shows that religion is not a foolproof solution to not being sure of your plans for when you die. It doesn't make you feel secure in your plans to be buried or burned. It makes your soul feel secure.

My new hypothesis is that people don't care all that much about what happens to their body in terms of how it is treated as long as "they"(their soul) is guaranteed to be at rest or happy. That is where the religious or spiritual aspect comes in to it. They believe that their soul will be at peace, so they are now okay with whatever happens to the vessel (the body).

HW 46 - Initial Thoughts on the Care of the Dead

The first thing i realized about the care of the dead is that almost all of my ideas have been influenced by Stiff by Mary Roach. The reason that this is worth mentioning is because it was the first real insight in to an industry that is usually relatively secretive. It isn't because the mortuary industry puts up an iron curtain, it is because most of us don't want to think about what would happen to us when we do die. We don't want to think of what kind of box they will put us in, or how they dig the grave. We just want to know that we will be taken care of.

It isn't all about fear, it goes back to the basic thought of ignorance is bliss. We will be happy if we don't know what an autopsy actually is, or if we don't know how hot a crematorium has to be to turn a human body to ash. What about leaving our bodies for science? What happens then? I believe that we don't want to know these things because to us, death is the end, we have heard stories about what will happen when we die, but we don't know for sure, so we are afraid and that is why Mary Roach's influenced me so much. Because it gave me insight into a world that i had never actually seen before, i had just seen the entranceway at funerals and such. But at funerals, no one thinks about what is happening around them because they are mourning.

I have experienced the death of someone close to me, you never see it coming, but in this case it wasn't a surprise. It shocked my family, but we accepted it, and after the body was cremated, that was it, we still speak about it, but we have a tendency to avoid where she is right now. We talk about how great she was, not where her soul is, or what happened when she did die. I feel like as a society, we have a very disconnected approach to death, we do not want to get tangled up in the emotions and the actual process of taking care of them. So we separate it. We grieve, and some people we don't know come and take care of the body. It is a process we don't really talk about, but is the same every time. Thats what i think about the process of taking care of the dead

Some questions i had were:

1. How does this process differ in other countries? What do they do?
2. Do people view death as a burden or as a relief?
3. How do people get in to the mortuary business?

HW 45 - Reply to Other Peoples' Comments

To All,

Thank you all for your comments. I appreciate the feed back about how my project demonstrated new ideas. I understand that i may have grammatical errors, but i feel that the point to my paper was to be able to successfully convey that we give people different advice based on what our relation to them is. If we are a parent we would give different advice to our children then if our friend asked for advice, not that it would be any better or any worse, just more pre-cautious. I do need to work on my structure and just overall how i get my point across, but thank you all for commenting on my blog.

Sam

HW 44 - Comments on Other People's Projects

Matt,
I liked your essay, you established that poor single mothers are a portion of the population who aren't helped in a way that they should be. I appreciated the amount of background information that you put in to the piece to really further your point. I think it is important that we recognize not only the hardships that these women face, but the opportunities that should be afforded to them. On a side note, i feel that id you put it though some sort of spell check to check for grammar it would make the paper much better. Altogether it was a good paper though
Sam

Alex,

I understand your feelings of the importance of health care reform. You make a very good argument in the form of a letter about what is wrong with the way the hospital industry treats pregnant women. I was particularly interested in the enthusiasm that you had in this particular topic. I also appreciated the way you took existing information that you had and put it together with new information to form your arguments. I feel that this is an important topic to me personally because i want to have children one day and i will need to be well informed of the choices that there are. Good post

Sam

Javon,
I think you had a great post, the way you go about the interview of this woman who had an abortion at 17 and then addressed what it means to be ready to become a mother. I think that you had some great ideas, especially about how a mother needs to be ready to put her baby before herself. I feel that this is a topic that is important to everyone because it involves not only being able to have children, but the emotional maturity to put someone else before yourself on a daily basis. I do agree with chris that you could have gone more in depth with this paper. But other then that i think you had some great ideas.
Sam

Brendan,

I think that you addressed an important point here. By looking at the comparisons between home birth and hospital birth i think you were really able to show some clear comparisons and contradictions between the two. You showed how dangerous hospital birth can be with your numbers and statistics comparing it to home birth. I really appreciated how you took the time to compare the two and show how people aren't aware of the dangers of hospital birth. This project really mattered to me because it is something that is very important considering i am going to have children one day so it is important to see the other side of the story. Good post, keep it up.
Sam

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Hi sam,
This is leticia

I enjoy reading your blog about the importance of having a baby and its part of our human nature. I really like the part when you mentioned "I believe that family have the most conscientious approach to raising a child, as they see it as a responsibility and not a toy. Friends look out for your best interests in terms of life style changes and possible career implications". Especially the line when you mentioned believe that family have the most conscientious approach to raising a child, as they see it as a responsibility and not a toy. Because I see my brother raising his child, he make sure his child is good and has the things he needs, I could he will be raised well, since the fact my brother is in his 30's and so is his wife.. But I have question for you. What do you think about young adults such as 14-20, They spend most of the time partying and not focusing on their child life? Are they responsible? Do their friends and family members support them? What do you think about that?

Also from your blog I like that you based it on religious views too. I think that’s also a part of people families and how they will like to raise their baby.... Is your religion view going to influence on how you would like to raise your baby?.. Do you think religion is important in peoples life

Sam,

I liked your blog post because it covered a very big and important topic. There are so many factors that go into deciding if you want to have a baby. One of the big factors in religion. One thing that really surprised me was that 83% of Americans belong to a religious group but only 40% of Americans attend a weekly religious service. This made me wonder how the religious people that attend a weekly religious service and ones that don't differ from each other. Do they have different opinions about pregnancy and birth? I thought that your post was very well researched and well written.

Dean

Samski,

I first off i love the first sentence of your project especially where you said having a baby is "our deepest animal instinct". You covered many important ideas that matter when it comes to having a baby and how a families religion correlates within the decision making around having children or not. One aspect that stood out to me was the bit you were talking about in your 5th paragraph about how religious Americans actually are. I found it crazy how only 83 percent of Americans belong to some type of religious denomination. Something I would of liked to see you add to this project would be maybe a comparative section maybe comparing maybe a country like china's birthing information and statics to Americans. But overall great project.
-Brendan.

Mom (Mentor)
As a "mom", and as your mom, it was fascinating to read about your observations on pregnancy, choice, religion and family. These are deep complex subjects that have so many layers and variables. For you who have lived a relatively short time, you have a pretty solid understanding of the depth and variables surrounding them. I will say there is still much you have to learn, but i am proud of your knowledge and sensitivity, as these are giant steps to enlightenment and understanding.

Brother (Protoge and Future President)
Your post did a good job focusing in on the factors that make up whether to reproduce or not. You brought out some helpful steps to help people consider what they need to think about before making this decision as well as who they should talk to.

I really valued the part where you used an authors steps for what people should consider. It gave your piece some real heartfelt meaning to show that these are things they should consider. You also explained them well.

This is particularly important for our society because it is undisputable to say that abortions are not a positive thing and neither is removing a child from its original parents. Therefore, to avoid those situations people need to be sure they want a baby before they go proceed and bring a child into their lives.