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A Search For Something Better For The Dying Process |
- A Poem of Death by Botkem Shahak
- Death has no farewell
He decides that today it is your turn
And he takes you.
And you will watch over your family from above.
You no longer suffer,
You no longer feel that he who was left behind,
He suffers and does not believe
Only yesterday we sang and danced.
Introduction
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Death is a part of life, but I don't like it. It is our destiny, which will be met. It will make you think life's journey may be predestined. You have the right to try to control your fate and destiny.
There are certain high points in one's life that create memories never to be forgotten. These are events that are good, bad, terrifying, and some incomprehensive, which are a part of fate. It is our destiny to life out these events, and from life, we learn experiences that will make a difference in how our future is shaped and how we live. Some events are a detriment, leaving scars that are indelibly burned into our memories and are recalled with fear and terror and often nightmares.
One of the best events can be a happy gathering of friends/family and loved ones and sharing with them our feelings on how we appreciated life, trying to override the negative and events that have saddened our lives, especially with the loss of someone dear, who was a pillar of our life.
The goal is to live life to the fullest and help others in need all you can on your pathway through life and try to attain the greatest amount of happiness and quality of life.
- Death knows no bounds,
It is the fate for all.
It makes all equal in the end,
It is a democratic process.
The distance one traverses in life from birth to death can be measured in many ways. There are many milestones, denoting the low and high points of life. There is an old saying that the hardest mile is the last mile you walk. The last mile has also been alluded to as the final episode in life, whether it is being on death row in San Quentin prison with the walk down the hall to the gas chamber or dying of an illness. The experience of dying has to be considered unique. In many ways, it can be considered similar to a cardiac or cancer patient facing death from disease, who also walks that last mile in life.
Quality of Life and Death Issues
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How you live will have a major effect on your health and your life. Not only your attitude but your activities can promote better health. Enhancing and enriching your quality of life will heighten your emotional experiences and reduce depression. By blending enjoyable activities, there is an increased pleasure in our daily living. By encouraging happiness, there are positive physiologic effects. What are the ingredients of how you can best fight for your life by using willpower to interact with one's fate?
- Courage, hope, faith, sympathy, and love promote health and prolong life.
A contented mind, a cheerful spirit is health to the body and strength to the soul.
A merry rejoicing, heart doeth good like a medicine.- Proverbs 17:22
Hope - We all hope for a better tomorrow when today's problems will be solved. Hope is said to spring eternal, but under the relentless daily fight for survival with an aggressive disease, hope may be deadened or crushed. When hope is lost, only depression and fear with the loss of the human spirit remain. Fortunately, every new day, new hope can be created to help each person continually try to alter their fate.
Love and Support - Without the support of those you love and who love you, life is not only shallow but lonely, and there is often a feeling of desperation. With love and support, a person has a better chance to cope and fight so that with luck and good fortune, one's fate can be turned around. By treatment, one hopes to gain a remission or an improvement in one's state of illness to achieving a recovery and returning to active daily living or just living with a better quality of life.
Courage - To fight for a cure, palliation, or in facing death, courage is critical. As one continues the fight against illness and death, it takes a lot of courage and stamina to persist, as so often there are rejections, failures, and defeats. One needs to continually strive to continue the fight, where renewal of one's courage and efforts are essential; otherwise, one may give up too soon when success might be achieved with additional efforts.
Faith - Only by keeping up one's faith can one succeed in gaining the most out of life. The final results of how we enrich our spirit is through our actions. By using positive measures, we can promote success.
- Choose life - only that and always, and at whatever risk. To let life leak out, to let it war away by the mere passage of time, to withhold giving it and spreading it, is to choose nothing.
- Sister Helen Kelly
Choices In Preparing For Your Mortality
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Death is like an earthquake: you know it's coming, but you don't know where or when. You know you should prepare for it, but somehow it's easier to put off preparations until tomorrow. Only 15-20% of Americans have signed living wills or advanced directives. Most of us have difficulty coping with the idea of our own mortality, much less preparing for it.
Yet, when you buy life insurance, draw up a will, or make a decision about organ donation, you're acknowledging the inevitability of death. If you don't make all your plans now, some decisions will be made for you, and they might not be what you'd have chosen.
An advanced directive, such as a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care (living will), can be used to make some of these choices when you are in good health. Since 1984, it is the most comprehensive document and the most effective for ensuring that your desires regarding health treatment are followed. Such decisions are best made before a crisis occurs, as, at such a time, you may be unable to communicate your wishes.
You designate someone to make decisions about your medical care, including withdrawal of life support, when you are unable to make decisions yourself. You can also indicate your wishes about prolonging life in this document and any other specific desires you have about your medical care, such as limits on nutrition and feeding and/or a request for increased doses of pain medication to limit suffering.
If you don't want to draw up a formal document, you can simply inform your doctor of your wishes, so he can write them into your medical record, or you can talk to your family and/or friends. However, a written document signed by you and witnesses or notarized is the best way to make sure your intensions are carried out.
- Here are some of the treatments you might choose (or reject) in a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care (codicils to your medical directive):
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1. CPR: Chest compressions, electric shock to keep your heart beating; artificial breathing; using drugs.
2. Mechanical breathing (respirator, ventilator).
3. Feeding and hydration through a tube in your veins, nose or stomach.
4. Kidney dialysis (cleaning the blood by a machine), chemotherapy (drugs to fight cancer), pain medications, or the use of antibiotics.
5. Painful or potentially harmful diagnostic tests - should they be done? - You may want to include a statement in the document of your specific preferences about treatment to give your agent and doctor guidance, or you may want to select one of the general statements below to reflect your wishes: I do not want efforts made to prolong my life, and I do not want life-sustaining treatments to be provided or continued:
- 1. if I am in an irreversible coma or persistent vegetative state
2. if I am terminally ill, and the application of life-sustaining procedures would only serve to artificially delay the moment of my death
3. under any circumstances where the burdens of the treatment outweigh the expected benefits, I want my agent to consider the relief of suffering and the quality as well as the extent of the possible extension of my life in making decisions concerning life-sustaining treatments. - Or I want efforts made to prolong my life, and I want life-sustaining treatment to be provided unless I am in a coma or persistent vegetative state, which my doctor reasonably believes to be irreversible.
Once my doctor has concluded that I will remain unconscious for the rest of my life, I do not want life-sustaining treatment to be provided or continued.
Or I want efforts made to prolong my life, and I want life-sustaining treatment to be provided even if I am in an irreversible coma or persistent vegetative state.
Sometimes, people know they are going to die and prepare for death by giving directions themselves.
An Ethical Will
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- This is a recording of your personal thoughts and wishes about your life history for your family and friends. How Do You Tell What Your Life Means?
- What if you only had a few minutes to live. What would you say? What would you do?
- Questions to think about? How would you want to be remembered?
- -What would you want to tell your family about your philosophy of life, recommendations about quality of life and living, and your personal experiences?
-What would you want to tell your family about your life as a testament to your loved ones? - The ethical will offers you a way to express yourself on what you wish your family to remember you by.
It is a common wish that when you die, you wish for your family to live long, healthy and prosperous - your children and their children are those who will probably continue your legacy of life.
We, in truth, are most lucky people in the world. We represent less than 1% of the world, and we have so much to be grateful for. Our goblet is not half full: it is really flowing over. We all know that we are mortal and that at some future time, we are going to die. In contrast to animals, who do not know they are going to die, their life span, in part, depends on predators, available food, and teeth to eat food. Some animals die when their teeth wear out.
There comes a time in everyone's life when death becomes inevitable. The time period can be very short or long, when one goes through that last phase in life, which has been called the last mile. I can vividly remember seeing a movie featuring the famous James Cagney about death row in San Quentin prison. The priest asked Cagney to walk fearfully and terrified down the long corridor as an example to other prisoners that crime does not pay. The prisoner, Cagney, demonstrated fear and shaking feet.
This can be pictured as a similar experience to those who are critically ill and are also facing death with a critical life-threatening illness or in a preterminal state. It has to be a very threatening, lonely and terrifying experience. Each of us may think we know how we will feel and act, but since few have experienced a pre-terminal ot terminal state, and none have returned from the dead, we really don't know what this experience is like.
Each of us may think that we will know how we will act and feel, but that is not always the case. How will we act - trembling, fearful, brave, or lacking courage? You don't know what it is really like to be in the shoes of someone else unless you have had that special experience yourself.
We live in a society that often demands instant gratification and happiness and tries to deny the reality of death. We are conditioned to deny death; thus, many persons, who are in the process of dying, feel confused and often have guilty feelings that they have not thought of or prepared for death.
We feel that by preparing more fully for death that it will allow us to live better. Each person faces their life and their death in a very individual way, and somehow those who have achieved certain satisfaction in the way they have lived and have gained gratification in what they have done, I feel, often face death with more equanimity, less fear, through the grace of living. As one survives each incidence, one may be given another to live and to adapt into a new career or way of life.
What you could leave are your intangible memories to future generations, which could be your legacy of life. Great men have often trembled as death approached, and it is said that we all fear death, especially when it is about to happen. Why such fear? Were our sins so great, and what was the price for success?
The way one has developed coping and attitude skills will affect how one copes in the present and the future. If, for example, one becomes very negative, one may react to bad (or good) news with an attitude with a change after a thoughtful process of mechanisms to help through coping mechanisms and hope. One has to evolve a process of coping by dealing with each problem and trying to find the best solutions on how to live to our fullest capacity.
An Advanced Directive - a paper you fill out
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- 1. National Death Act Declaration formerly called a Living Will
2. Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care
3. A legal will for your estate (where is it located?)
Decisions For Making Life Easier For Those You Love! The Legacy of Love
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- 1. Your personal arrangements:
- a. Cemetery and burial arrangements
b. Mortuary and funeral arrangements - Do you wish a small (family) or large funeral?
Who should give the eulogy, be pall bearers? - c. Write your own obituary for the newspaper as a help for your survivors
d. Who is your attorney (where is your will)?
e. Who is your executor/trustee?
f. Insurance information, Medicare number, military number
g. Where are your records and safety deposit key and location of box? - Insurance policies and financial/estate information
- h. List Pension plan, IRA, Keough, bank accounts, Social Security
i. A list of family members and friends (Telephone numbers and addresses) to be notified - The Time to Act is Now. It is Never Too Late!
Medical Emergency Information - A Simple Card
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Medical Emergency Information - A Simple Card Text version
Medical Emergency Information - A Simple Card PDF version
Conclusion - Life and Death
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The only real death is to have done nothing in your life for which you will be remembered or achieved deeds for your own satisfaction. Even the satisfaction of doing a small kindness for someone in need makes life important and meaningful.
When you are told someone you love is going to die, your heart skips a beat and the clock/time stops.
When it's time to restart, life is never the same. How do you help a dying person to die, a way to handle his grief, and how to live better?
We never know when anyone will die, so every day, try to live positively, do a good deed, and show love for your family/friends.
First appeared March 29, 2007; updated November 20, 2007