DISCUSSION
Read the Passage! Do you agree or disagree, or can you relate to his or her opinion in the post? ADD any thoughts or additional information that you may have found concerning their topic?
Awareness Contexts and Stages of Death
What impact does the family and friends have on the dying person’s ability to move through these stages of dying?
Family and friends have an active role to play in helping the dying person move through the stages of death. Leming and Dickson (2020) describe these stages as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Family and friends, just like a person dying are not ready or willing to let the person slip through their fingers. In most cases, friends and families avoid bringing the topic of death to their sick even the terminally sick loved ones. In most cases, even though they can see the condition deteriorate, they keep encouraging the loved one that they will get better and eventually things will back to the way they were before. In this case, they share the sentiments of anger and denial with the dying family member affecting the capacity for them to move through these stages.
Does the family’s discomfort about talking about death hinder the dying person openly talking about death and moving through these stages?
Certainly yes, the family members want to keep a bold face and remain hopeful that their loved one will recover. The discomfort means that the family keeps the dying person in false hope. While the dying person is not willing to open up for the fear of heartbreaking the family members, the family members on their part want to inspire hope. They want to make their loved one comfortable that they have not given up on them and that something will still happen and they recover. In this regard, the terminally ill patient on palliative and hospice care remains stuck for longer in the denial stage than if the family was supportive.
Do you have any personal experience to share regarding this?
Sometimes the issue of dying appears simple when it is affecting people far away from you. However, when the experience hits you, you can never feel comfortable talking about it while facing your loved one. I have nursed a family member who was terminally ill, and talking to the rest of the family to admit that she was going to die was not easy. I could not be the one to break this news. Thus, the anger, denial, and depression stages took longer and she died before I could get to the acceptance stage.
