HW 17

My experience with illness and dying isn't so extensive. I have known people that died, the closest being one of my good friends when I was in fourth grade. Two of my grandparents died two years ago, but I wasn't really close with them. My best friend's brother died almost four years ago. My grandparents' deaths were of illness. The other two were from, respectively; being hit by a car, and electrocution from train tracks.

I haven't been around illness ever really, so I don't know how it goes. Dying, I don't think there are any social norms really. You just die, there's no socially acceptable way to die, because people can die from pretty much anything. Illness, presumably, involves visiting a hospital and having those close to you come to visit and be with you in your last moments.

I think illness and dying are such personal things that no can really set a social norm to them. Each individual person  is going to deal with an illness their own way. If I were terminally ill, I wouldn't want to be hooked up to a bunch of machines that were keeping me "alive". I'd rather be out doing as much of the stuff that I'd always wanted to do that I could fit into whatever time I had.

In what we see to be the regular, I guess, people are supposed to be with their families. But what if someone doesn't have a family? We think that they're are depressed at their death because their is no one with them. How do we know that that's not how they wanted to go? Maybe some people want to be alone in their last moments, but their families want to be there to the end. Do you respect the dying person, or do you stay because you know you will never have them again? It's extremely depressing, and this unit will be hard to stomach, but I'm sure we'll uncover a bunch of stuff that we never knew. To be honest, I don't know what my family does with the whole illness/dying thing. I know that my father went to see his parents when he knew that they were almost clocked out, but other than that, I don't really know.