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Care Giver's Attitude To Death

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Everyone will face death, sooner or later. Based on our understanding of life forms, it is the inevitable ending, all living force will end up losing the battle with time and fall into the void of darkness. Death is universal, but not our responses and expectations. Our attitude and expectation toward the ending of life are constructed socially, there are many influential factors. In the readings I've read for this week, they tackled this issue in the manner of ritual, care giver's perspective, and a special emotional response - grief. The first essay I've read was written by Dr. Myerhoff. She understood death as a ritual drama. To her, we "yearn for a good death" (Myrhoff 1992:417). In the article, she discussed what makes a death good. …show more content…

She mentioned Harper's five-stage process of caregiver handling death. First stage is intellectualization (where the worker obtains an understanding of the diagnosis/ treatments); Second stage is increasingly uncomfortable with the dying process and starts to experiences sadness and guilt; Third stage is "grow or go" (Hasselkus 1993:446), if there is no sense of pain and grieving, the worker is likely to retreat from practice with dying patients and 'go'. But if it can grow, fourth stage will be developed; Fourth stage is an emotion stage that offers a sense of freedom, increase comfort with the dying and can cope with the idea of loss; Fifth stage, the last stage, is when the worker able to comfortably discussing about death issues like funeral arrangement, wills, and unfinished businesses. She concluded that coping with death is difficult for professions like occupational therapists too. The last reading was done by Dr. Klapper, Dr. Moss, Dr. Moss, and Dr. Rubinstein. They focused on adult daughters who have lost a parent …show more content…

Death isn't something everyone looked forward to facing. They provide many perspective to this 'forbidden topic'. The article I want to talk about is the first one because I think I am more related to it, as I am not a daughter and luckily my parents are still alive. The first reading present death as a ritual, and it is cultural. In China, we have an old saying of "death as light as a feather, or as heavy as a mountain", it told us to make our death worthy. I guess in a way, it showed us that death is an act to show our worthiness, and we should make our family proud, making our name listed in the history books. It became a ritual and even the funeral is just a ritual. The bigger, more beautiful (the location, fung-shui, and statues etc.) ones showed the greatness of the deceased one. Like the empire Qin Shi Huang from the Qin dynasty, upon his death, he copied his whole army and buried everything with him, as a sign of his total control and unchallenged power. But can these really benefit the deceased? Or is it all just a show? That is a question we can't

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