#understanding-death

#understanding-death

"A Death Cafe is not 'a grief group, a counseling session, or a place to push religious or other spiritual agendas,' Leija says."

The widespread practice of showing the Eid Al Adha slaughtering to children can desensitize them to violence, as many families take pride in this tradition.

Witnessing the presence of God at a bus stop in 2011, I felt overwhelmed by something indescribably majestic, which bared my soul to a profound realization.

When Dympna Little lost her beloved mother Lily Little to ovarian cancer in December 2024, it was her online community - she posts comedy videos as @dimplestilskin on Instagram and TikTok - who provided unexpected support and understanding of the experience of grief.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk writes in 'The Body Keeps the Score' that trauma doesn't just live in our minds - it reshapes how our bodies respond to emotion. Sometimes, when we experience significant loss, our nervous system essentially decides that feeling is too dangerous and shuts down the whole operation.

So long as I manage to avoid lightbulbs or stay out of wine glasses, the buzzing will inevitably give way to silence. My wings will abruptly stop flapping and I'll careen towards the ground like an asteroid. I'll become a speck on a rug, a bit of debris absent-mindedly vacuumed up by someone who has no idea what adventures I've been on in the past minute.

People who had never married 'generally fared as well as, if not better than, married persons.' They also found that people who had no children were no different from parents in the quality of their life in their last month.

I think everybody worries when they come to the last stages, no one knows what to expect, but these people are wonderful at relaxing you and they help you an awful lot.

We were both in our 60s and had no health problems that were about to kill us any time soon, but our parents had recently died, so end of life issues were on our minds. Plus everyone knows writing a will is the responsible thing to do. We'd talked to lawyers. While I considered my friend a close one, we didn't have many friends in common. I knew he had a brother and sister.

For decades, the gold standard for the coma-induction phase of euthanasia was thiopental. It was swift, reliable, and highly concentrated and rapidly induced a deep coma. In 2011, however, the European Union banned the export of drugs used for capital punishment, including thiopental. In the wake of the ban, manufacturers withdrew or tightly controlled supplies to avoid association with executions, making the drug increasingly difficult to obtain. "Thiopental is very difficult to get now," Horikx said.

Every day you get closer to your death. This is the phrase that shook me to my core when my high school teacher, Mr. Murphy, presented it in Religious Knowledge class. I was 14 years old. I immediately objected, calling it depressive in an attempt to protect my classmates-or perhaps myself. He looked straight at me and said, "It is simply the truth. Take it as you wish."

Today I saw images of students leaving their school with their hands raised in the air, hours after cowering in fear and terror in barricaded classrooms. Nine dead and twenty-seven wounded in the tiny Rocky Mountain town of Tumbler Ridge. The mayor, Darryl Krakowka, said, "I have lived here for 18 years. I probably know every one of the victims." And this in Canada, which often seems to us Americans like a bastion of sanity and normalcy in comparison with our madness.

I was suspicious, even cynical, about what the world insisted was vital to the life of my unborn child. I was partly sceptical because so much of the advice I was getting was contradictory. But I was also suspicious because I'd spent most of my 20s reading Nietzsche. Nietzsche is not, perhaps, a natural choice for a young mother. But he helps to fuel certain questions about values, and purpose, that are central to questions of care.

Chronic illness changes everything. At the beginning of many people's chronic illness journey, they may feel as if illness is an annoying detour that will be forgotten as soon as they can heal and get back to business as usual. As it sinks in that illness has changed them irrevocably, they realize that their pre-illness self is gone forever. This painful reckoning with pain, fragility, mortality and identity leads to an existential crisis. In addressing this crisis, existential therapy can be extremely helpful.

'They're dead.' In disbelief, my response was unfiltered. 'What?' Followed by the F word. A wave of emotion rushed through me. My chest tightened. My body went cold. I could not immediately find the words to offer condolences, not because I did not feel them deeply, but because inside, my many parts were experiencing a collective shock. When you live with dissociative identity disorder (DID), news like this does not land in one place. It ricochets across all parts within.