How a nontraditional funeral helped this mom process her daughter's tragic death.
Lucia Maya remembers getting a phone call from her 21-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. She was in agony.
A creative writing student at the University of Arizona, Elizabeth had been dealing with intense pain in her chest for weeks, along with swelling in her neck and face. The student health clinic told her it was probably bad allergies.
"She called me one day in tears because she was in a lot of pain," Lucia said. "She wasn't one to cry or complain. I said, 'OK, something is clearly wrong.'"
Elizabeth was rushed to the emergency room, where an X-ray revealed a tumor in her chest the size of a baseball. The diagnosis was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Lucia (right) and her daughter, Elizabeth. Photo by Jade Beall, used with permission.
Six rounds of chemotherapy initially beat the cancer back, but soon it had spread to Elizabeth's brain. Not even a year after first discovering the pain, Elizabeth was placed in hospice care. She'd spend her final days in her mother's home.
There was nothing more the doctors could do.
Lucia was suddenly in the strange and tragic position of having to plan a funeral for her daughter while she was still alive.
The first step for many people who are grieving is to make arrangements with a funeral home. But there's another option gaining popularity with many families: home funerals.
Joanne Cacciatore, a research professor at Arizona State University who studies traumatic death, wants people to remember that caring for our own dead used to be, well, just the way things were done. It was around the Victorian Era (the mid- to late 1800s) that both birth and death were institutionalized, or shopped out to experts who had special tools and training.
She said more and more people are now bucking that norm and skipping the mortician altogether.
Photo by Jade Beall, used with permission.
A home funeral often involves bypassing the usual embalming process, instead opting for more gentle methods of preserving the body: keeping it cool with dry ice and bathing it, for example. Some families will hold a viewing at home before sending the body off to be prepared for a traditional burial or cremated. Others, depending on local laws, bury their loved ones on family land instead of in a cemetery.
While home funerals are often much less expensive then traditional ceremonies, Cacciatore said this choice isn't usually about money. For many people, it's about healing.
"I think it has a therapeutic effect, in that when the person you love has died, and they're at home, you can check in with that reality as often as you need," she said. "You can go in that room, you can sit in that room 24 hours a day for three or four days, and you can watch their body, and see that they're not there."
For other people, they wouldn't dream of doing things any other way.
"Who better to take care of someone you love so much than you?" Cacciatore said.
After two months of being cared for by her mother, Elizabeth passed away on a Sunday in late 2012.
Elizabeth's body was kept at home for two days and covered in silks and fabrics. Photo by Lucia Maya, used with permission.
Elizabeth hadn't eaten for weeks. Her mother woke up at 4 a.m. the day she passed away, sensing the moment was about to arrive. Lucia held her daughter's hand as she took her last breath.
By this point, Lucia, her partner, Elizabeth's father, and even Elizabeth herself had decided a home funeral was right for them, though Elizabeth didn't like talking about it much. She was at peace with whatever was going to happen.
"What was so lovely was that we knew there was no rush to call the funeral home to come pick up her body," Lucia said. "We knew that we had time."
Lucia and her sister bathed Elizabeth. Anointed her body with oils. Laid her on a table with dry ice packed underneath. Wrapped her in beautiful silks and cloths, with rose petals sprinkled on top.
Photo by Lucia Maya, used with permission.
On Monday, family and friends came and went, saying their goodbyes in the place Elizabeth called home. A friend brought a cardboard box that would later be used to transport Elizabeth's body, and visitors decorated it and filled it with notes of love.
On Tuesday, Lucia and close family members placed Elizabeth in the box and drove her to the crematory. They watched as her body entered the cremation chamber. Lucia thought it might be too difficult to watch, but she said when the moment came, she was ready.
By then, she felt her daughter's body was nothing but an empty vessel.
"It felt so healing to be able to do those last things to take care of her," Lucia said.
"To be the one to bathe her, gently, to be the last one to dress her, to cover her with these beautiful silks that I know she would have loved — it would have felt very, very strange to send her body off and have some strangers doing those things for her, no matter how loving and caring they might have been."
She knows a home funeral isn't the right choice for everybody, but she shared her story because she wants people to at least know that it is a choice.
For Lucia, being able to make that choice means she gets to live without a single regret about how she spent her final days with her daughter.
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
At least it wasn't Bubbles. 
You just know there's a person named Whiskey out there getting a kick out of this. 
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.