Week Seven- Dying and Spirituality

Must We Age and Die?
Must we all decline as we age, moving inevitably toward death? So far, no person has attained immortality. (Life Smart p.256).  What is missing in death and dying?
What is death? "Establishing when people are truly and finally dead has been a medical, and therefore social problem for centuries. Fear of being prematurely buried alive has been one of humankind's oldest fears."(Life Smart p.280). This has always been my questions for the past 16yrs since my mother passed away. Because I have live here in the United states for many years, and been exposed to all the technologies when I was told my mother died, I was devastated not knowing the cause of her death at age 62 and not sick. I still question my family that were present at the time of her death that who pronounce her dead. Most of this people are not in the medical field and kept wondering if they know the different between different types of death mention in the book: clinical death, biological or cellular death and social death. To make the matter even worse she was a practice Muslim and has to be buried before dawn.

Another area in the readings that I can relate to is: The role of grief-"Grief is an emotional response to the loss of another person, and includes feelings of anxiety, despair, sadness, and loneliness."(Life Smart p.284). In my Nigeria culture, yorubas to be specific, if a person died, people mourn differently depending on the age of the deceased. When my grandmother died I was about 14yrs old, we all cried and cried on that day. Then on the 8th day we are all dancing and eating which yorubas termed celebrating the life of the death especially if they left older children behind. It was different in terms of my mother, I had delayed grief probably because I was not physically there or have all these doubts about the cause of her death. I could not attend the funeral in Nigeria due to some reasons beyond me but my older sister was able to videotaped all the events and I finally able to put closure to it after 40days.