Hw - 29 Reading and Noting Basic Materials

Facing Terminal Illness:

Knowing that you or someone else will be facing certain death has to be one of the most traumatic experiences for yourself and to others. Its puts everything in a different perspective that either defeats you or you accept what it is. In "Tuesdays with Morrie", the main character who was diagnosed lugaris disease, Morrie, accepted his illness and decided to make the best out of it. He figured that there was no point in being miserable about what life had to offer to him and that "once you learn how to die, you learn how to live"(p.82)

The Process of Dying:

Seeing everything in different perspective I guess would be apparent to those who face near or certain death. For Beth Bernett, when her husband was diagnosed with cancer, one of her more humorous but deeply true insights were that "when you get sick enough; Dignity goes out the window." Which is true for many because they need to be taken care of like they were at their infant stages and its funny to see how we age from this infant stage to adulthood back to our once previous stages in life. One thing that I also found very true to her speech was that when a family member gets sick, it brings families closer together. Why is that it takes someone to come close to dying, for everyone to come together like that? Is it a tendency to feel sympathetic to others because your own condition is better then theirs? Another thing I realized about Beth's presentation was that when her husband was in the hospital, the hospital had a tendency to curtain the ugly and the beauty of death. They like to coat the truth by telling the "heroic" stuff that you see in Movies and on TV.

Being Sick:

I don't have any personal "own" experience where being sick altered my perspective of things, but close family members and my parents approach to illness and dying shape my general views of how I should approach it. Until I interviewed my parents, they never really talked about illness and dying to me. It was not much of a topic to bring up to me because in their heads any "rational human being should know what to do around someone who's sick; Irrational people wouldn't."