Following the British Medical Journal’s website discussion about death and dying, Dr Chris Browne who edits the health and fitness section of My Last Song, has put out a statement saying that doctors treating the very old or terminally ill should encourage them to write their own personal death plans.

“The reluctance of patients and their families to discuss death as the likely outcome of an illness or because of old age makes their end of life medical management more difficult.

“If by filling in a death plan the patient, the family and the appropriate health professionals have a more meaningful discussion, the result is likely to be a more positive approach with obvious benefits for the patient, their loved ones and the medical staff treating them.

“By having a personal death plan, the patient and the family will be more reassured that the time leading up to the final moments will be as comfortable and comforting as possible.

“As a GP I believe that death plans should be encouraged as a way of changing attitudes towards death and dying.”

Within the Lifebox section of My Last Song is a death plan templatewhich allows people to state:

• how much they want to be told about their condition,
• where they want to die,
• the level of medical intervention they want,
• who they want to be responsible for their end of life treatment,
• who they want to visit them when they are dying,
• who should be there when they die,
• what they want to hear, (music, poetry, drama, prayers…),
• what they want to smell (incense, scented candles, oils, flowers…),
• how they want to be touched (hand held, caressed, gentle massage…),
• issues to be cleared up so they have no worries at the end (knowing their loved ones, pets are cared for, their estate is in order, their will is up to date…).

Too many people still die a lonely, impersonal and frightening death which reinforces society’s reluctance to discuss the subject. We only die once so it should be, if possible, the experience we want it to be. Personalised death plans will make that more likely.

Thankfully there is now a concerted move to reduce the taboo surrounding death. The Dying Matters Coalition, of which My Last Song is a member, is spearheading this change of attitude towards dying, death and bereavement.

On 1 July, the General Medical Council published Treatment and Care Towards the End of Life, recommending that death should become an explicit discussion point when patients are likely to die within 12 months.

Then in September, the BMJ’s website published a piece called We’re All Going to Die. Deal with it which highlighted the need for candid discussion about palliative care and end of life medical treatment.

My Last Song supports visitors to address all their end of life issues, put their legal and financial affairs in order, organise their care options and plan their own funerals.

This information can be stored in a secure online Lifebox. Only the Lifebox owners can store and edit the information until they give permission to a close family member to open it, normally towards the end of their lives or on their death.

I’m rather impressed with the idea of a bronze portrait as a way of being remembered for a very long time. Well, until someone decides to melt it down!

I’m not ashamed to be able to offer to visitors to My Last Song the opportunity to have their heads modelled in bronze by one of the country’s leading bronze portrait artists, Lindy Branson.

After all, My Last Song was created to ensure people are remembered the way they want to be remembered – the right music, the funeral that best matches their beliefs, views and lifestyles, their own Lifebox in which their cherished memories and personal details are stored to be accessed by future generations.

A bronze memorial portrait is easy to organise. Lindy has perfected a way in which she reduces the time the subject needs to sit by using photographs and precise measurements.

The process only requires two to three sittings at her delightful Parsons Green studio to achieve a wonderful likeness. The clay head is then taken to the foundry to be cast in bronze.

The client is able to choose from a variety of patinations (colours) for the bronze. More than one bronze portrait can be made from the original mold.

The process takes about three months from the initial sitting to the presentation to the client of the bronze head, neck and part of the shoulders, mounted on a slate base.

The resulting memorial bronze portrait is a fine piece of art which your family will treasure long after photographs fade or portraits get stored and ignored.

To be remembered by your loved ones, choose a bronze portrait so they have a physical reminded of your presence.

And have a Lifebox so they can see all the information you wish to leave them – a digital time capsule containing  your life story, your achievements, your details…the information that made you the unique person whose likeness has been so well captured by the bronze portrait.

The My Last Song Lifebox is the area of the website where people are encouraged to save their funeral wishes, letter of wishes and the personal details required by their executor when they die.

This will reduce the terrible stress and anxiety felt by the relatives immediately after someone dies when they realise they have to arrange the funeral.

All too often, the parted has left no wishes, and so families don’t know if they will be organising the sort of funeral their loved would have wanted.

Yet if grieving families know they are giving the loved one the funeral he or she wanted, they feel more positive and can come to terms with the loss more easily. The goodbye they are giving the parted is somehow more reassuring if they have arranged the funeral in a less stressful and more constructive frame of mind.

The Lifebox is also the place where people can store other personal information in sections such as Favourite Things; Friends; Life Story; My Obituary; Photos; Music; Scrapbooks and even My Secrets.

Currently with 50 megabytes of storage available in each Lifebox (and this likely to increase over time) the Lifebox subscriber can store video clips or audio recordings giving personal messages which can then be accessed by close loved ones for years after the subscriber has died.

The opportunity to go into the Lifebox and watch or hear the loved one will undoubtedly reduce the sense of loss,  because the loved one will seem to live on as people can see the face, hear the voice, recall the mannerisms, be touched by the smile.

To some extent the same is true of the written information subscribers puts into their Lifebox…to know their favourite music, favourite films, favourite holiday destinations, their achievements, their friends, even their secrets, mean their memory is much more vital and will remain so for far longer.

That is why I’m so encouraged by the positive feedback I’m getting to the Lifebox as a particularly useful online area not just to ensure the subscriber has the funeral he or she wants, but as a place that can provide a sort of digital immortality, reassuring to loved ones now and in the future.

My Last Song helps people plan their end of life issues.

Among the most relevant is your funeral, or that of a loved one. After all, you only get one chance to get it right.

A lot of people like to have poems read at the funeral, or to read poems to commemorate the departed loved one.  And many people like to write their own poems as a special tribute and to relate uniquely personal messages.

These can be very moving and emotional poems and at their best deserve to be recognised as works of literary merit.  Others can be sentimental, facile and trite.

So to encourage the former and reduce the latter, I’m proposing to launch a My Last Song funeral poetry competition.

Hopefully this will produce a canon of suitably well written contemporary funeral poems that visitors to My Last Song can read for inspiration and to use and adapt if appropriate to be read at their funeral or that of a loved one.

I’ve posted a forum on Sheer Poetry asking for help in organising the competition. For example I need three suitable judges and advice on the criteria.

Sponsorship would be great but I’m a realist and can’t see anybody wanting to sponsor a poetry competition but am willing to be proved wrong.

If you would like to be involved, or enter once it’s up and running, keep looking at My Last Song for information.

Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart has issued guidelines about how Catholic funerals should be conducted. He states that pastors should avoid allowing the funeral to become a celebration of the deceased person’s life.

“Secular items such as romantic ballads, pop or rock music, political songs, football club songs are never to be sung or played at a Catholic funeral,” says his guidelines.

You can’t help but wonder if he woke up in a bad mood that day, as he continues: ”A Catholic funeral is not ‘a celebration of the life of Mary Brown’ or ‘a memorial service for Mary Brown’. These designations should never appear in media announcements or on the booklet.”

Hopefully such guidelines won’t be repeated here, because as the My Last Song poll on funeral music indicates, secular music is far more popular than hymns.

The baby boomer generation that 50 years ago redefined the youth culture is now redefining how society looks at death and dying.

They don’t want the ‘cut and paste’ anonymity of traditional funerals which is why secular music at funeral ceremonies is now so popular.

My Last Song describes funerals which mix religious and secular elements as the Modern British Funeral.

The Modern British Funeral is more celebratory than grieving as family and friends give tributes to the loved one rather than listening to readings delivered by the minister.

Other features of the Modern British Funeral include informal dress codes, colourful eco-friendly coffins, greater accessibility to mourners of other faiths and interment in Woodland burial sites.

The Modern British Funeral recognises the growing secularisation and diversity of our society, and concerns about our environment., which is why families increasingly request that money is donated to good causes rather than spent on funeral flowers.

I’ve no doubt that similar ‘modern’ funerals are common in Australia, and realise that Archbishop Hart was giving guidelines for funerals of practicing Catholics in his diocese.

Should, however, Archbishops here consider following his example, they would do well to consider that a mix of secular and religious is a pretty good compromise, at a time when compromise is important for friends and family of a departed loved one.

The new(ish) My Last Song poll asks people to vote on choices of what they want to happen to their bodies when they die.

The choices are Burial; Cremation; Eco-friendly church or cemetery burial (which means eco-friendly coffin and charity donations in lieu of funeral flowers); Woodland burial; Used for medical research and Leave it to my family to decide.

So far 15 per cent have chosen the last option. That is to say, they don’t want to take any responsiblity, they are happy to leave it to their families.

Well, one thing is certain, families won’t be happy to have to deal with all the issues that arise when a loved one dies. For when you are numb with shock, when you are grieving and when you are trying to come to terms with the loss, you are at your lowest.

And to have to make difficult decisions such as the choice of funeral arrangements and looking for all the important details of the life that has just ended so that probate can be sorted out quickly adds significantly to the stress and anguish.

Why would you want to leave a mess for your loved ones to sort out when, with a bit of planning ahead, you can ensure that most of the issues are dealt with, and moreover, on your terms?

So if you are environmentally aware, you can plan for your own ‘green funeral’. If you have no religious convictions, you can have a secular funeral. If you want your life to be remembered by certain pieces of music, you can state what these are.

Similarly, you can ensure your estate is passed to whoever you want to benefit by making and updating your will and letter of wishes. You can list all the details which your executors and close family members will need in the days and weeks following your demise.

If you do this, your loved ones will not just be relieved, they will be extremely grateful you had the foresight and good sense to sort out your end of life affairs while you were able.  They will think better of you, and their pain and stress will be lessened.

The Lifebox within My Last Song has been created to make this process as easy as possible. There are sections for organising the will, writing the letter of wishes, planning the funeral arrangements and listing all the necessary details that need to be known.

The Lifebox also has other sections that enable the family, now and in the future, to have an accurate insight into the departed person’s life and times.

So, if you are thinking to choose the ‘Leave it to my family to decide’ option in the My Last Song poll, think again. To leave it to your family to sort out your affairs just after you have died is a callous and even cruel decision which will make life even more difficult for your loved ones.

With the My Last Song Lifebox to guide you easily through the process of putting your own affairs in order, there’s no excuse for making your loved ones’s lives even more difficult…and not having the ending that you want to be remembered by.

My Last Song is a website that deals with end of life issues as positively and supportively as possible. Mainly people, but also pets.

Maybe it should include political parties, because the Labour Party looks as if it’s coming to the end of its life.

This is the list of candidates to be its new leader: Diane Abbott; Ed Balls; Andy Burnham; David Miliband; and Ed Milliband.  Of these, the only one who deserves to be leader because she is not tainted with the previous Government’s mistakes is the least likely to win.

The most likely is David Miliband. He thinks that to follow most closely Tony Blair’s New Labour policies will be most likely to gain the support of the British people.  He might not be too pleased to have this message amplified by Lord Mandelson, since one is judged by one’s friends, but sticking to New Labour’s vision is what David thinks will win him the leadership.

I would like to remind David Miliband and those members of the Labour Party who might be thinking of voting for him that the British people are not stupid.

New Labour will be remembered for bringing the country to the brink of economic catastrophe and blighting the prospects of future generations. We will remember it for defaulting to authoritarian measures and wanting to take away our liberty.

The country won’t forget that the Labour Government oversaw the abuse of Parliamentary expenses which resulted in politicians of all parties losing the trust of the British people.

Above all, the British people will remember its illegal and hugely misguided foreign policy which destabilised the Middle East, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, radicalised many young British Muslims thereby making our streets less safe, reduced the UK  to the status of a US puppet whose strings were pulled by George W Bush, and damaged our standing in the world accordingly. Who will ever forget the humiliation of Bush’s ‘Yo, Blair!’ greeting at the G8 conference.

Millions of us marched through London asking Blair not to invade Iraq, knowing the likely consequences. We were ignored.

The British people will not forget that throughout most of the New Labour Government, David Miliband held high office, including that of Foreign Secretary. His performance in discharging the responsibilities of that post was scandalously inept.

Nor should we forget that Ed Balls was an adviser to Gordon Brown during the first years of the Labour Government, elected in 2005 as an MP and then fast tracked to be Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. During this period, this financial genius, along with Gordon Brown, allowed our economy to head for the buffers at a frightening speed, blind to the inevitable crash that cost the country billions of pounds.

Meanwhile, the best that can be said of Andy Burnham was that he looked pretty on TV, spoke well on the radio and gave whatever message number ten told him to deliver with a sham northern sincerity which fooled few people. From his time as an adviser to Chris Smith in the early years of the Labour Government, Andy Burnham was a true advocate of New Labour.

Ed Miliband was just as true a disciple of Blair’s New Labour vision, as a visit to his Wikipedia page will show.

Diane Abbott loathed these hypocrites and often spoke her mind. She is likely to come last in the leadership election.

The leadership election papers are sent out on the day that the founder of New Labour publishes his account of his leadership.  From what I’ve heard on the radio, it demonstrates that the rift between Blair and Brown was so huge that the Government could barely function.

Worse, Blair still believes it was right to have invaded Iraq and gone into Afghanistan. Moreover, interviewed by Andrew Marr, he thinks that there should be a military intervention if Iran develops a nuclear weapon. Tony Blair is, let us remember, the UN’s Middle East ‘Peace Envoy’.

If the above proves anything, it is that the Labour Party has for many years been devoid of a soul and principles that voters can believe in.

And without these qualities, any political party will wither and evenutally die.

If voters elect David Miliband, his continuing adherence to New Labour policies and principles will hasten the end. But whoever is elected, with the exception of Diane Abbott who might just be able to restore its soul, the Labour Party is in terminal decline and we should be planning its ending now.

As for the choice of the Labour Party’s last song, put your selection in the comments box.