“Fear of Death”
Feeling about death is different in people. Most people scare about death for thousands of reason; people think they lose what they built during their life and don’t want to say good bye to this world and everything on it such as their family, friends, and money they earned even their clothes. It’s not only say goodbye to material thing, they even scare of losing all memories they have. For people fear of death is worse than the death itself. According to “fear of death” by Elisabeth Kubler- Ross, growing technology changed ideas about death. As she says “Education have effected a low morbidity and mortality among children. The many diseases that used to take an impressive toll among the young and middle-aged have been conquered. The number of old people is on the rise”. Education helped people to have longer way but death its not something to stop.
One of interesting topic that I read and I feel it in my self too is how she explained death is always distasteful to man. She mentioned “in our unconscious mind we can only be killed; it is inconceivable to die of 1 a natural cause or of old age. Therefore, death in itself is associated with a bad act, a frightening happening, something that in itself calls for retribution and punishment.” It is really true that we cannot imagine actual ending of our own life, I believe this is one of the reason that every time we hear someone death it’s something sad for us and if that person was one of our close friends or family we hurt more not just because we feel we lost the connection with them and understand that we can no longer make memories with them but because we see death one step closer to us. I believe death is so scary for us because we don’t know anything about it and what happen next. Even though every culture has their own believes about life after death but even with the huge technology we have in this world right now, death is still something unknown for us. We can cannot forecast what happened after death and it makes it scarier.
Another emotion linked with dying is a feeling of anger. Those who are ill are not the only ones that may experience this feeling of anger and madness. As kubler- Ross discussed in her passage. The child whose his mother has passed away experience the feeling of anger because he thinks his mother deserted him, this is a form of displaced anger. It is obviously not the mother fault but the child sees it in this way because he want the logical answer for this lost. On the other hand the patients may feel anger towards the god for making them sick or even the doctor for not being able to provide a cure for them. And this feeling and anger about death was always with the humans not just for our own death even for our loved ones death, as she explained, “many of the customs and rituals that endured over the centuries and whose purpose is to diminish the anger of the gods or society, as the case may be, thus decreasing the anticipated punishment. I think of the ashes, the torn clothes, the veil, the Klage Weiber of the old days-they are all means of asking others to take pity on them, the mourners, and are expressions of sorrow, grief, and shame.”. when we lose someone who were close to us you feel like you lost part of your world that you shared with that person. This event makes you feel sad, frustrating, guilt, and in our deep down we feel depressed for loosing that person and see ourselves as part of the reason that they die. Ross explained that feeling too with bringing the example of husband and wife. I know many people whose still feel responsible for their beloved death and it still hearth them even after a long time. Even though we know death is something natural and it happened for everybody but this knowledge can’t help our regret.
Death comes to everybody’s life in different ways, ages, and it could be predictable or unpredictable. Death can happen any time and you don’t know when is the time and this fact makes it even more scarier. “When we grow older and begin to realize that our omnipotence is not really so great, that our strongest wishes are not powerful enough to make the impossible possible” she said. I really like this quote because it makes me think about two things first that as we grow up death it’s not something that get easier but even harder, may be because as we grow we have more things in our bag of life therefor would be harder so lose them. Second point is that we as a human have the most power between all the creatures but even humans with all the power of thinking and choosing cant skip this part of the life which I believe its door to another world.
