HW 17

First Thoughts On The Illness/Dying Unit:

  Death is the one certainty in life, and accepting its finality is hard for anyone. Facing one's own death with equanimity is hard for people in many situations. Much harder is the acceptance that those near and dear to one will also die, when feelings of grief and anger, and of loss and often loneliness, are inevitable. Such feelings are worse when a life has ended prematurely. In view of this, it is scarcely surprising that so many people, whether religious or not, consciously shut the concept of death out of their minds and only face up to it and cope as best they can when they have to. This pattern is particularly common in countries where death is no longer an everyday event and has become virtually a taboo subject. People in many western countries often go through life never having seen a dead body.

  A social norm on death and illness would be to ignore it, the whole out of sight out of mind theory. Both death and illness have a lot of baggage to begin with. They both bring experiences, memories, and emotions making them one of the topics that people don't talk about a lot.Plus there is a whole negative vibe that most people get from it. Firstly life is short and thats an indisputable fact. Also from the moment one is born they are dying. People fear what they cannot understand and death is not understandable Since death is forever and its also inevitable its a topic which makes people feel uneasy.                       

  In my own experiences with death it has numbed my senses towards it, partly because Ive lost a lot of people in my life.Ive been taught not to shun the idea of death and since I know its inevitable that made me want to embrace its concept rather than avoid it. That wasn't true for my whole life. The first time I lost someone I never wanted to talk about death again, but after the 4th funeral I went to I realized that this is something that just happens.

  One thing that I found really interesting was how humans view death differently from animals.One of the single most important characteristics that separates humans from animals is not that we speak, or have technology or intelligence, or use forks and spoons, but the fact that humans are the only creatures that are aware/cognizant of their own mortality. 


Thoughts:
There is an African tribe that has a saying that when interpreted goes like this: "Unlike the birds, man knows that he will eventually die; thus he will never fly free"