HW 19 - Family Perspectives on Illness & Dying

In my family illness has been somewhat of a long struggle. Although I can't know for sure because I have never really spoke to my parents about it to much. Recently my grandpa has been very sick and he has had diabetes for a while. He has had to do a number of things such as take medicine and go to the hospital. On the other side of my family both of my grandparents died of cancer but that was before I was born. My father also has arthritis in is leg and it got so bad that he needed to get a hip replacement.

For my whole life I have always been afraid of death and the idea of death. I remember when I was very little I asked my parents to not even say the word around me. So it has never really been talked about in my family too often. Not only that but I don't have anybody in my family that I know well enough that has died. When somebody did that I didn't know my parents responded with mourning and seriousness. At the time when I remember this happening I was too young to understand and asked why. I got an answer similar to because someone died. So I was taught never really to ask questions and just to be sad.

In my family there has been a lot of sickness but I never have to go to the hospital to often. I haven't had to since my dad got his hip replaced. I understood that this was a big surgery that couldn't be done by just resting it off. After he got his surgery my fathers friend, my mother, and I all went to visit him in the hospital. It was very clean and safe as far as I knew, but very plane and not someplace I would want to stay for too long. This was the same for my father who didn't want to stay either. It turns out that he ended up leaving two days before he was suppose to. So it seems like to me that the hospital is not a bad place but its a place nobody really wants to go unless they have too. Knowing that I was in a hospital gave me the feeling of death around me which made me somewhat uncomfortable.

Illness and Dying HW 17

When I think of illness and dying the first thought that comes to my mind is what happens after you die. I feel that this is something that comes to everybody's mind at least once. There are so many different approaches and religions that try to explain what happens after you die. But I realize that it is impossible for me to know, or for anyone to truly know. If somebody claims to have talked to god and nobody was there then it could be a lie or maybe that person is crazy. It is also quite possible that this person did speak to god. It just seems like religion is just a way to tell people how to live using the one thing that they hold dearest to them, which is their lives and their families lives. As I said I would never be able to know what happens. I have had numerous thoughts about what could happen but that is just a prediction. It seems like there is just nothingness afterword but that brings up body and spirit. Weather the body and spirit are separate or if it is all one. If the body and mind are separate then there are endless possibilities to what the afterlife is but if not it seems like literally a dead end. I have no idea what exactly illness is. Whenever I have had been sick I have never really felt like I had microscopic organisms attacking me from the inside. To me that sounds a bit abstract but this is what I have been taught my whole life so that is what I have to go with. But I still have never seen any germs or any sicknesses so I can't really know for sure what it is that makes people sick. I have always been taught that dying and illness are very serious things which is true. You always have to treat sick people good and always respect the dead. Nothing really that seems unreasonable. When a person dies all they leave behind is there memories, which is really the only thing we all have, so in respect to that many try to keep the memory of that person alive.