Final Essay : Final Suffering Paper

It was not sudden; she had been suffering for a little less than a year. I kind of remember the “chain of reactions’ that led up to the diagnosis. It was around the fourth of July and we went to my grandparent’s house to celebrate. Shortly after arriving, everyone migrated to the pool area, where my Dad noticed that half of my grandma’s face was “melting” and her arm wasn’t through one sleeve of her shirt. After pointing that out, my grandpa proceeds to inform us that a few days prior, she had fallen on the ground while outside as a result of a medical issue and has been off ever since. Surprised to hear this, my dad told my grandpa to take her to the doctor. This day was the beginning of the end.

Everything is perfectly fine, everything is great, then one day it all comes crashing down and shattered pieces are left. My life would never be the same but I guess change is for the best and it forced me to become the person I am today. It’s rough to be the oldest child, especially when your mom is diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and you have 3 younger sisters that look to you for comfort when their mom can’t be there. When the cancer is spread throughout your moms body doctors can’t just get rid of it no matter how badly you wish they could. Rounds of chemotherapy only slow it down, yet it’s still there a lurking monster waiting to reappear at any given moment. Nothing can even begin to describe the fear I felt, and still have to deal

Between Dignity and Despair, a book written by Marion A. Kaplan, published in 1998, gives us a portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany by the astounding memoirs, diaries, interviews with survivors, and letters of Jewish women and men. The book is written in chronological order of events, from the daily life of German Jewish families prior to when the Holocaust began to the days when rights were completely taken away; from the beginning of forced labor and exile to the repercussion of the war. Kaplan tries to include details from each significant event during the time of the Holocaust. Kaplan

As Hope and her family fought cancer, their faith in God kept them grounded. Stuart and Shelby, Hope’s parents, would often ask God for signs that he was watching over her. Some of God’s signs were miraculous to say the least. When Stuart was in the mountains, he saw a huge billboard that read, “Hope Thou in God.” Additionally, when Shelby went to pray in the chapel at the hospital a stained glass window titled “The Hope Window” featured a picture of a young girl on crutches with God’s hands placed on her shoulder as he was healing her. God was certainly watching out for the Stout family.

A woman name Angela Hundley and her family were away on a family vacation in the Dominican Republic. While there Angela ate fish that caused her to become very ill. Two weeks after they returned home from their vacation she was diagnosed with ciguatera poisoning. She could not open her eyes or lift her head. The doctor informed the family that the poisoning was untreatable, and an incurable. Angela felt like she was in a comma, she couldn’t move but she could hear everything. She could hear her children playing but she couldn’t play with them. She remembers her husband taking her to her church for prayer and at the alter she recalls her pastor asking her “Angela have you thanked God through any of this, even if you don’t see another day,

Five days had passed this time since anyone had heard from my mother. I remember praying to God to protect her from harm and for me to find her. The next day she showed up, but not in the way we had hoped. One morning as I was getting ready for school my sophomore year in high school, my phone rang to the voice of my stepfather. My stepfather had told me he heard a call come over the dispatch scanner at his work and my mother’s name was mentioned. The sheriff had informed my stepfather that my mother had been involved in an accident. My stepfather asked me to go to the emergency room and see what condition my mother was in because he lived a half hour away from the hospital. When I arrived at the hospital I found my mother cut out of her clothes, covered in her own urine, massive amounts of blood all over her body, and lying lifeless on life support on the table. At this point, no one knew whether my mother would be okay. My mother had bleeding on the brain as well as a tear in her shoulder, a shattered face, and a chest tube draining fluid from her lung which had collapsed. All I could do was pray! My mother’s life was in God’s hands now. Three days later she woke

The stages of mourning and grief are universal and are experienced by people from all walks of life. Mourning occurs in response to an individual’s own terminal illness or to the death of a valued being, human or animal. There are five stages of normal grief that were first proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying.”

On May 10, 1990, Moises had arrived to Mexico for another one of his quick meet-ups with his parents as it was Mexican Mother’s Day. He had stayed for a couple of days with his parents and siblings, and during his stay, even more people came around to meet up with up and wanted to hang out with him. During this time, he had learned that my mother was recently engaged to my father, Guillermo Diaz, and the wedding was going to happen in a couple of months from now. Moises’ face was just like the face of my mother when she had seen him in America, utter shock and happiness. He immediately hugged her just like she had in the past, and stated that, “He was very proud of her.” It was a very touching moment indeed, as many people all around came to

When I turned 11-years-old my whole childhood began to change my life went from being perfect to everything but perfect. One day I came home to hear the news my father, my best friend; my hero was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. Not knowing the struggle my family was about to take on I just began to cry. I had a million things running through my head what’s going to happen? Will everything be okay? Why him? What is going to happen? With all these things rushing through my head all I could do was cry not knowing this was least worse to come.

On Death and Dying By Elisabeth Kubler-Ross For my book review, I read On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Dr. Kubler-Ross was the first person in her field to discuss the topic of death. Before 1969, death was considered a taboo. On Death and Dying is one of the most important psychological studies of the late twentieth century. The work grew out of her famous interdisciplinary seminar on death, life, and transition. In this paper, I give a comprehensive book review as well as integrate topics learned in class with Dr. Kubler-Ross' work. Like Piaget's look at developmental stages in children, there are also stages a person experiences on the journey toward death. These five stages are denial/isolation, anger, bargaining,

What is Suffering? Suffering is the state of undergoing pain, distress , or hardship.Pervasive suffering is suffering of change. Suffering from change means starting out with pleasure and it turning into pain. There are three different ways of suffering visible,hidden and invisible. I think the most common way is hidden because nobody wants to show that inside there really suffering .Is there a way to end suffering? No there is not a way to simply end it. Suffering is something everyone encounters there is no way around it. Everyone encounters death, old age , sickness,etc. . The story that i most find interesting is the story of Dza Mura Tulka. He was deeply in love with his wife and didn't do anything without her. He loved her so much that

The suffering of man is a very complicated matter that is most likely impossible to understand completely. It is a subject that people have grappled with since the dawn of recorded history. In fact, suffering is evident in every form of art man has created. Suffering is in our paintings, our poetry, our music, our plays, and in anything else that is conceivable. But still, we as a whole still struggle with the idea of suffering. It is my opinion that some individuals may grasp the notion of suffering more than others, but that no one person will ever fully understand suffering in every form. A person may only understand his or her own personal suffering, not suffering as a whole. It is the next step to then say

Edgar Allan Poe once said, “Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.” Suffering has long been in our world ever since the dawn of time, as it is inevitable in society. Views on suffering differ, ranging from a religious point of view as it looks at suffering leading to reward with God after death, or just adversity on Earth that will either build or crush a person. No one chooses to be born in a position of suffering, I certainly did not, but a person is able to choose how to use his/her situation in order to use it for the better. As a young kid born in Cairo, Egypt, I was put in an environment where opportunities to move ahead in society through education were scarce. A corrupt political system in addition to persecution against

The phone rang again. Hoping for good news, yet again I was disappointed. It was my mom; she said she was following our pastor to my grandmother’s house. She said, “We are going to tell Grandma he’s gone”. I knew this would be one of the hardest things to do; it was her birthday after all. The three of us jumped in the car. We drove up to Grandma’s house. I remember Tosha running into the house and falling into her arms. Everyone tried to pull themselves together, but how could this be? This had never happened to us before. The wheel was broken.

For years we still really do not know what happened, she died an eighteen-year-old woman with an eighty-year-old heart. All our questions went unanswered, lost, and even our religion we began to have doubts. Was there a god? How could he have done such a thing? The healing process was not easy, but became necessary for our families to move on in life. We all needed to heal in life and our faith.