Coping with Death and Dying

Death
UNIT 1 SEMINAR
The first time I ended a serious relationship, I felt a lot of regret about it in the days after the breakup. I thought that I had hurt the other person (we had been together for a few years) and I worried that I had made the wrong decision. I kept thinking about all the different ways in which perhaps it could have worked out. I had to remind myself that I had very good reasons for ending the relationship and that my emotions were only telling one side of the story.
I believe this situation interrelates with the concept of death anxiety with respect to what Barnett, Anderson and Marsden (2018) showed in their study of the relationship between pessimism and death anxiety. They found that optimistic or pessimistic attitudes will change the extent to which one suffers from death anxiety. Pessimism tends to be more associated with high degrees of death anxiety than optimistic attitudes (Barnett et al., 2018). In my experience, I think that my pessimistic attitude towards my relationship was what really caused me to feel so much anxiety about it. I was never that optimistic about it. But I can see how optimism would make a difference in how one views a situation or transition—whether it is a breakup or something like dying.
UNIT 2 SEMINAR
A great war like WWII would be an example of a historical event that might have resulted in death being viewed as the Great Leveler. An attack like the one suffered at Pearl Harbor or a battle like the one at Verdun where so many young men lost their lives or the bombing of Hiroshima in Japan—these are events that could easily stand out as being instances in which Death is seen as the Great Leveler.
As a force that unites and separates, death has also been seen—especially following tragedies like 9/11. Because so many people felt that horrific, tragic moment even if they were not directly impacted by it, they nonetheless were able to put themselves in the shoes of those who were there and who did experience that tragedy. As Hoyer (2018) notes, some optimism can thus be pulled out of grim instances like this because people begin to feel like they are united in a common struggle.
In contrast, the media’s treatment of casualties in recent wars has served to separate us from death by depersonalizing the tragedies suffered by people in the Middle East. Their lives are not depicted as being human or as human lives lost as being meaningful to us. The media portrays so many people over there as just being enemies of America and people like Assad are portrayed as brutal dictators. Yet there is of course a human story to be told and instead of feeling the same way about the tragedy occurring over there we simply block it out because we let the media dictate to us what’s important and what’s not. The media’s control over our emotions through the use of the propaganda that is put out by the newscasters is quite impressive and to be honest a little frightening.
UNIT 3 SEMINAR
Hurricane Katrina was one natural disaster that the U.S. government failed to respond well to. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes and a lot of people suffered in the immediate aftermath because the FEMA response was so slow and disorganized (PBS, 2005). Another natural disaster was Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which wrecked the upper northeast coast of the U.S. Again, there government was slow to respond, though politicians like Chris Christie and Obama made appearances on TV to show their solidarity—coming across the political aisle—to express support for the victims. Power was still out in places for a while but the response was not as bad as it was in the south following Katrina. A third natural disaster was the Chicago heat wave of 1995, in which hundreds of people died. Authorities were very slow to respond to the heat wave, partly because it was a strange phenomenon with particularly intense heat occurring in some parts of the city.
Specific examples that illustrate how the response to natural disasters could decrease the number of people who die in these situations are preparedness. Katrina was a disaster because the region was just not prepared for it. Chicago was a disaster because the authorities did not communicate well. By communicating and preparing ahead of time, more lives can be saved.
UNIT 4 SEMINAR
I would be supportive of dying persons accomplishing whatever tasks they are wanting to perform in order to cope with their experience. I would never be critical of these tasks or try to downplay their importance. Our time on earth is limited and when we become conscious of that we tend to be more awake to the realities of the world around us and the possibilities of being more engaged and having an experience. Preparing to leave this world and say goodbye to one’s life can be overwhelming, and just doing some tasks, whether simple or big, can really help to keep one’s balance and sense of optimism. So I would always try to be positive and keep an open mind about the process and the way dying persons cope through activities. Just being able to perform tasks that make them feel like they are still alive, that give them some meaning is important to maintaining a quality of life that is acceptable.
References
Barnett, M. D., Anderson, E. A., & Marsden, A. D. (2018). Is death anxiety more closely
linked with optimism or pessimism among older adults?. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 77, 169-173.
Hoyer, D. (2018). Pulling a Little Optimism Out of a Very Grim Account of Global
Inequality. A Review of The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel (Princeton University Press, 2017). Cliodynamics, 9(1).
PBS. (2005). FEMA faces intense scrutiny. Retrieved from
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/government_programs-july-dec05-fema_09-09