Morbid Curiosity

I don't always understand how my brain works or why I feel driven to learn about certain things. Lately, I have felt a compulsion to understand the process of dying. No one that is close to me is terminally ill, and I have no premonitions about my own health or death. In some respects I guess this is the other end of the continuum of my education about health and life. I used to be a doula and have a pretty good knowledge of how people get here. Now, perhaps, it is time for me to round out my education and learn about how they leave here.

This is a rather strange subject to delve into. Death is the one thing that we don't want to deal with, but which is always hanging over us. You can't get out of life alive. Ok, so how do we get out?

Prior to the advent of antibiotics, death was far more common and life was often far shorter than it is today. The smells, sights and feelings of death were things that were commonly experienced by earlier generations on an uncomfortably regular basis. Death wasn't limited to only the elderly -- many babies, many youths, many young men and women were struck down in their prime by a variety of circumstances. Now, fewer babies and young people die and life has been extended into the 80's and 90's for more and more people.

The result? Death has become something that many of us are not familiar with in our youth. The shortness of life is easier to ignore. And when death comes, it is sanitized very often by the intervention of doctors and nurses, morticians and funeral home directors. The reality of death is almost limited to the void that is left by the person being gone. There is little that we personally have to do with our family members who pass on. You can hire someone else to do it.

Of course, not everyone is so arm's length from death. There are those who do hospice care in their homes for their loved ones so that they are in familiar surroundings when the end comes. When I go, I hope that I will be able to do it this way. I don't want to be in a ward in a rented bed. I want to be in my own surroundings with those I love around me to encourage me on. Of course, we don't necessarily get to choose how we will die or where. But if I had my druthers....

I wonder if birth control would be so popular if people didn't think most of their children would make it beyond the first few years of life?