Death and sustainable happiness

Death and Sustainable Happiness

In primitive cultures, the process of death and dying was reverential. It was expected that, at some point, one's body would simply tire and one's soul ascend back to nature, or to a specific spiritual place depending on innate cultural beliefs. As humans congregated into urban areas, death was around them constantly; through pestilence, disease, starvation, and the inhumanity of humans toward each other, death became an everyday occurrence, almost numbing the individual towards the overall paradigm. And how is it contemporary America treats its aged citizens and those who are ill and ready for death? Typically, "as a person with no right to an opinion" (Kubler-Ross 141). In fact, we are more comfortable institutionalizing those who are dying, paying lip-service to their care, but really wishing their issues, their needs, and indeed the process, would simply disappear from our self-imposed sense of reality. Too, rather than allowing one to die with dignity, on their own terms, we legislate the morality of life and death decisions -- preferring that our elderly remain vegetative, on life-support, all dignity of personal decisions and private matters torn away, simply so we can justify that we did "everything possible to keep our loved one alive" (Messerli, 2007).

Rationale - Grief is a part of being human, everyone experiences transformation in many ways; active, passive, pushing and shoving, begrudgingly, etc. Loss and grief, rather than being a tragedy of living, and be an opportunity for transformation and personal growth. In general, grief can help us from seeing ourselves as the center of the universe and seeing the universe as the center of who we are. Grief and loss as are transformation -- as a process to move through. Kubler-Ross, one of the foremost authorities on the subject, is more general in believing that humans will all go through her stages, but at different rates. Grief or loss can cause change -- force evolution, if you will, into the human ability for personal growth and self-actualization. Certainly grief is a human emotion; as much a part of us (Kubler-Ross, 2009). Psychologically, grief is a response to loss -- conventionally emotional, but also having physical, cognitive, social, philosophical, and even behavioral dimensions.

There are numerous theories about grief, some popularized, some scholarly, but all try to explain the "process" humans engender when dealing with loss. Even one of the more popularized, yet useful, theories, Kubler-Ross, though, states that the grief stages, "have evolved since their introduction, and they have been very misunderstood over the past three decades. They were never meant to tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss. There is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives" (Kubler-Ross, on Grief and Grieving, 2007, 1).