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Anorak News | Death Becomes Her: New Fashions In After-Death Nursing Home Care

Death Becomes Her: New Fashions In After-Death Nursing Home Care

by | 18th, August 2008

LILLIAN McIntyre, 88, has died in the Cherrywood Nursing Home in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

Dry your eyes, Lillian died in 2004, and there has been time to grieve and to heel, if not to forgive.

Nurse’s aides Tahirah Shakur, Keisa Cooper and Nichole Jackson were detailed to prepare her body to be moved to a funeral home.

The women “posed McIntyre’s body by raising her hands into the air, putting her arms behind her head, and bending her knees,” the appellate court ruling says. It’s keep-fit for the newly deceased.

“They also patted McIntyre’s hand and told her to ‘wake up.’ Shakur took a picture, using the camera on her cellular phone, of defendants Cooper and Jackson hugging McIntyre’s dead body.”

The nursing home is an affectionate place, is it not?

The state Attorney General’s Office charged the women with physically mistreating a patient, a violation of the nursing homes section of the Public Health Code. It is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison and/or a $10,000 fine.

But attorneys for the women argued that because McIntyre was dead, she was not a patient, and, therefore, the statute did not apply.

She was non person.

They filed a motion to have the case thrown out, which was heard by the appellate court.

“The act defines a patient as being a person, and, taking all emotion out of it, we argued because (McIntyre) was deceased she wasn’t legally considered a person under the law,” Jackson’s attorney Derek Wilczynski said.

In their six-page ruling, the appellate judges wrote, “While we condemn the behavior of the defendants and find their actions reprehensible and disrespectful to the deceased, they do not comprise a violation of the statute.”

It is believes the deceased was buried with arms by her side and her face up.

But Anorak wonders if this is not a little old fashioned. Are there new fashions in burial we should be aware of?

Has anyone been buried dancing, doing the splits, reading a book or watching the telly while leafing through a copy of OK!. We should be told…

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Posted: 18th, August 2008 | In: Reviews Comments (6) | TrackBack | Permalink