¶ … Death and Dying
Human life is riddled with conflict and moral dilemmas. The process, journey or instantaneous moment of dying is by no means exempt from this. Many would agree that it's fair to say that most human beings harbor a fear of death. Nuland is correct in stating, "To most people, death remains a hidden secret, as eroticized as it is feared… Modern dying takes place in the modern hospital, where it can be hidden, cleansed of its organic blight, and finally packaged for modern burial. We can now deny the power of death but of nature itself" (Nuland, xv). This is indeed an accurate assessment with the current dynamic that most people have with death. Death is tucked away for the most part, in an institution where it is sanitized and compartmentalized and "controlled" as much as possible by other human beings. In attempting to get some "control" over death and making it less blightfully organic as Nuland points out, death has paradoxically gained more power over human beings in that many people fear it. Tucking death away among the steel white chambers of a hospital just increases the mystique of death and with it, people's fear of it.
For example, Nuland's argument that if people were to understand the biological processes that occur within the human body, one would not be so frightened of death and would be unlikely to find it quite as mysterious. Nuland is indeed correct. When I was five years old and my grandmother died, my parents told me that she died in her sleep. While this is an appropriate answer for a child, it's hardly an accurate one. Furthermore, this answer caused me a great deal of stress and anxiety as a child, because I was afraid that I might die suddenly in my sleep as well, as...
I learned later on in life that my grandmother died from a heart attack in her sleep. In such an example, my parents had a tough decision about how to explain such an unpleasant subject to a child, particularly one which is so entirely complex, but I still believe that they owed me a slightly more comprehensive (and accurate) answer. For example, my parents could have said, "Our hearts keep the blood moving around our bodies which keeps us alive. The blood was blocked from your grandmother's heart while she was asleep and that caused her to die. This is something that happens to old people." Such an answer would give a child a better sense of the mystery behind death and not instill a fear of one suddenly and inexplicably dying in one's sleep.
One of the troubling and most tragic phenomena of life is suicide, an act which is poorly understood and has a general air of taboo around it. "We seem to separate ourselves from the subject of self-murder in the same way that the suicide feels he himself separated from the rest of us when he contemplates the fate he is going to choose. Alienated and alone, he is drawn to the grave because there seems no other place to go. For those left out and left behind, it is impossible to make sense of such thing" (Nuland, 150). Truly the most smarting and unbearable part about suicide are the untold damage and unbearable pain that it causes the people left behind. I date a young man (let's call him Nicholas) whose best friend in the world, a best friend who was more like a brother to him, committed suicide three years before we had ever met. Nicholas had found his friend hanging from one of the rafters in his garage. He took him down and called an ambulance, but it was much too…
