Why are so many people afraid of death?
Afterall, we will die.
I do not understand folks fear of dying. However, I blame our healthcare system in the United States. Gently blame since it is not a healthcare system but rather an attempt to manage disease system. The doctors mean well.
At one point, people died with dignity in their homes unless tragically killed in war. That part is a story for another time on the evolution of the funeral business and it’s not pretty either.
Up until 1920 the leading cause of death in the USA was bacterial infections. And then penicillin came around to wipe it out, good news, but created a disaster due to every product from hand, face and body soap laced with antibiotics. Folks wanted everything sterilized and we effectively destroyed our body’s innate ability to heal itself with tome, patience and common sense.
Medical schools taught the art of writing prescriptions and ordering tests. As modern technology advanced more tests were ordered. Insurance companies grew in numbers and started dictating what gets paid to the provider. Pharmaceutical companies started creating and pushing more drugs. Medical students recited the Hippocratic oath ignoring its message: “let food be thy medicine and medicine be they food”.
ignoring its message: “let food be thy medicine and medicine be they food”.
The biggest message to the doctors was to never let your patient die. Use every pircr of equipment and drug to keep them alive. A patient dying was a bad mark on the reaccreditation of said physician. And do not discharge a patient and have them readmitted with the same diagnosis in 30 days. A similar negative effect.
So what are we left with? Family members gather bedside to a loved one breathing thanks to a ventilator, fluids from an IV, fed by tube, peeing into a catheter. The bills pile up, bill collectors follow and hound. Homes are foreclosed, people lose jobs due to too much time at the hospital, college children quit to get jobs to help out. Relatives take in the houseless relatives.
Death lurks in shadows
Weaving a shroud of people
Patiently waiting.
Families gather
Sharing sweet memories
Sadly awaiting death.
Who suffers the most? The family. Medical bills pile up, bill collectors leave harassing phone calls and threatening letters. Jobs are lost as their time is spent at the hospital. Foreclosure comes too quickly; college students drop out to take entry level positions to help keep the family afloat. The teens are watching the little ones and losing time at school. The family suffers.
But their loved one is still alive—not really, an empty shell is tethered to machines, and tubes. The doctor is pleased, his patient is “alive” and his job is safe. How do we remedy this fiasco? Education. Teach new medical students the dignity of death. Teach the families the dignity of death. Have counselors and clergy assist in spreading the old way. We each deserve a death with dignity, at home or hospice. We deserve now.
Coming soon is the absurd cost of funerals and the history behind a movement of necessity that led to a big corporate move to greed.
Thanks, Jann - 100% wholeheartedly agree with everything you said. Medicine is no longer about saving lives and keeping healthy when money and profits become the core agenda.
“He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living.” (John Williams, Stoner)