12-week curriculum by Connie Barlow for assisting middle school youth in the life passage from childhood ("Explorers in the Garden") to early adolescence ("Thespians at the Oasis"), which uses the understandings drawn from the 2008 book by Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, and using scene-by-scene the Disney movie The Lion King as a beloved bridge and focus for the middle school mindset. Understanding the naturalness of death of elders and of periodic psychological deaths as one transitions from one stage of life to the next is central to this curriculum.

Connie Barlow's proposal for a new form of Group Health Insurance to serve individuals who share a philosophy that death is a natural part of life — not something to be battled irrespective of the emotional, physical, and financial costs.

Excerpt: "This is a modern tragedy, replayed millions of times over. When there is no way of knowing exactly how long our skeins will run — and when we imagine ourselves to have much more time than we do — our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register. We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumor, put in a feeding tube if a person can't eat: there's always something. We want these choices. We don't want anyone — certainly not bureaucrats or the marketplace — to limit them. But that doesn't mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something. Is there any way out of this?"

Excerpts: Make no mistake, the purpose of long-term-care insurance is to help finance some of the greatest misery and suffering human beings have yet devised. . . That is the thing that you begin to terrifyingly appreciate: Dementia is not absence; it is not a non state; it actually could be a condition of more rather than less feeling, one that, with its lack of clarity and logic, must be a kind of constant nightmare.. . . "Old age," says one of Philip Roth's protagonists, "isn't a battle, it's a massacre." I'd add, it's a holocaust. Circumstances have conspired to rob the human person — a mass of humanity — of all hope and dignity and comfort.

I do not know how death panels ever got such a bad name. Perhaps they should have been called deliverance panels. What I would not do for a fair-minded body to whom I might plead for my mother's end. . .  The alternative is nuts: to look forward to paying trillions and to bankrupting the nation as well as our souls as we endure the suffering of our parents and our inability to help them get where they're going. The single greatest pressure on health care is the disproportionate resources devoted to the elderly, to not just the old, but to the old old, and yet no one says what all old children of old parents know: This is not just wrongheaded but steals the life from everyone involved. . .  And it seems all the more savage because there is such a simple fix: Give us the right to make provisions for when we want to go. Give families the ability to make a fair case of enough being enough, of the end's, de facto, having come. . .  Not long after visiting my insurance man those few weeks ago, I sent an 'eyes wide open' email to my children, all in their twenties, saying this was a decision, to buy long-term-care insurance or not, they should be in on: When push came to shove, my care would be their logistical and financial problem; they needed to think about what they wanted me to do and, too, what I wanted them to do. But none of them responded — I suppose it was that kind of email. . .  Anyway, after due consideration, I decided on my own that I plainly would never want what LTC insurance buys, and, too, that this would be a bad deal. My bet is that, even in America, even as screwed up as our health care is, we baby-boomers watching our parents' long and agonizing deaths won't do this to ourselves. We will surely, we must surely, find a better, cheaper, quicker, kinder way out. . .  Meanwhile, since, like my mother, I can't count on someone putting a pillow over my head, I'll be trying to work out the timing and details of a do-it-yourself exit strategy. As should we all.

Stars that lived and died before our sun was born created all the calcium in our bones and the carbon in our cells.

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Live Programs on Death by Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd

Helping individuals find inspiration and hope in a larger and beneficent context for death is a core function of religions throughout the world. Our culture is reticent to talk and educate about death in meaningful ways, in part, because deep and unexamined assumptions about death hail from widely accepted understandings born of another era, and these old assumptions are not up to the challenges posed by death today. In telling the 14 billion year story of cosmos and life as a sacred story, we (Connie Barlow and Rev. Michael Dowd) have developed programs grounded in the new cosmological understanding born of modern science that present death as natural, generative, and something to be trusted and even celebrated.

Both of us begin our programs with an important caveat: Individuals can adopt a new and expanded view of death as natural and generative while continuing to embrace the full diversity of beliefs about what happens to spirt, soul, or consciousness after death, and while honoring the teachings of their particular religious faith. Our aim is simply to offer individuals a larger, natural, sacred context within which to see and experience the material fact of death in a new and liberating way.

Whether given as a 20 minute sermon in a church on a Sunday morning or a two-hour graphically-rich presentation in a school, a retirement community, to hospice staff/patients, or a myriad of other venues, our programs on death consistently elicit gratitude, trust, hope, and deeply heartfelt stirrings in those who experience them.

Click here for more information on Connie's and Michael's programs

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"Death, Budgets, and Generational Justice"     in TEXT, AUDIO, or VIDEO In August 2011, Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd gave twinned theme talks at two events in the American West: "Evolutionize Your Life" (by Michael) and "Evolutionize Your Death and Legacy" (by Connie). Inspired by the audience response and poignant storytelling that ensued, Connie wrote a call-to-action in essay form, urging her boomer generation to transform the debilitating and financially untenable death-denial that pervades American culture — largely because of literalist Christianity that interprets death as "the enemy."

Note: Connie speaks in the above video of what she learned from participating in her mother's death in 1998. You can access online an essay Connie wrote about that experience: "Clouds and the Crystal Bell.

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"I am at peace with his death." In the summer of 2004, Connie and Michael were jointly presenting an evening workshop at a Unitarian Universalist church in Ohio. Connie did a component on the creation of atoms inside of stars, and the importance of those stars dying and giving back to the galaxy all that they had created during their lives. A woman sent us an email afterwards, which read: "During Connie's talk about stardust, I knew why I had come. My father, who took his own life in May, always told me I was made of 'star-stuff'. After hearing you, I am at peace with his death. His spirit is with the goddess, but even stars die, and his substance will continue on as new life. Thanks so much!"    As the years pass, examples continue to accrue of how this perspective can restore hope after the death of a loved one. In the summer of 2007, Connie's sermon on stardust at a Unitarian Universalist church evoked this tearful comment from a woman: "I lost my son six months ago, and this is the first thing that has helped me with my grief. Thank you!" In autumn of 2008, Michael's talk at a spiritual retreat center in Cleveland evoked another tearful expression of gratitude — this time from a woman who finally felt she could come to terms with the death of her three-year-old grandchild.

"Every day I deal with death." Connie received this email in 2007, from a young woman, after Connie's sermon on death at a Unitarian Universalist church in the Midwest: "I am a funeral director intern and will be getting my license within the next couple of months. Every day I deal with death. Every day I hear sermons about Adam's sin and death's sting. I always feel strange, sitting at the back listening to whichever preacher happens to be the pick of the day. I always knew I didn't believe what they spoke.     I learned about evolution and the Big Bang from teachers who didn't believe in it, but who had to teach it. I watch programs on it on the Discovery Channel. I believe it. But I have never had it put into a story that could define me. It was always distant, something that heppened in the past. You brought to me the first creation story that I could relate to. No talking snake in a tree tempting a nude woman. No. You gave me words to a story that is based in fact — something I can make my own, something that is my own. And for that, I thank you." Note: A cartoon tract depicting the biblical creationist view of death can be read online at http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/5001/5001_01.asp.