DYING MOMENT

Our very basic instinct when it comes to death is certainly unwelcome and eerie to talk like a taboo that we don’t want to entertain in our mind.  Because of this notion, the initial reaction of everyone is fear.  Under the impression of scared and weird, we always look death as negative, orthodox and conservative feeling that we better avoid.  We always find it unpleasant, painful and sorrow because we see the deaths of patients suffering from prolong illness, unexpected death in accidents or tragedies and corpse of killed people.  There is severe pain in these deaths, who want pain anyway?  Can you imagine the pain of those fractured bones, feelings of internal vital organs failure, suffocation, or tortured before slaughtering?  How they feel during the last moments before their death?  Pain is what we always think.  But what if death is not caused from these unnatural deaths?

Dying moment could be not that painful as we think.  If a person dies in natural way, meaning it was not in fatal accident, heinous killing or severe sickness, would it be still painful?  Maybe death is not painful if a person has died because of old age?  Actually in medicine (and in science), there is no really such thing as “died due to old age”.  For sure, once the person died, something is wrong in the body accompanied by medical explanation and proof.  But for the sake of discussion (or argument maybe), let us say a very old person had died without suffering from prolong and severe illness but because of let say simple flu knocked out the weak body resistance that easily gave up, can we imagine how does it really feel during the dying moment?

No one exactly knows how it really feels when we die naturally.  Maybe a slight pain is there when we take our last breath compare to the bloody pain in man-made deaths.  But that slight pain is fast and just up to the last minute, once that breath is taken you will no longer feel it.  And it will just take a very few seconds to cut that last breath compare to the days or years of sufferings when bedridden. All of us will die whether we like it or not.  Everybody wants to die gracefully.  Many of us are praying that if we will die, we wanted to just go sleep and never wake up.  When we hold our breath for a long period of time, we feel the difficulty but not the pain, and this gives us the very idea of dying.  If you are lucky to get age without illness, dying naturally could be not in pain but in difficulty like holding the breath.

If a person is ready to meet his death, will it make different?  When we are tired enduring all the sufferings in life, struggling so hard to live the miserable life, when we are down to take failures, poverty, physical harms, to bear all this could make a person numb that you want to rest and you become ready to die.  When the body is unresponsive from emotional pain, to die is nothing than these emotional and mental pains.  The same when a bedridden patient is suffering from acute sickness for long time, slowly the mind is accepting his time.  And we better want to see them go than looking their discomforts and sufferings.  Let them in peace, in no more pain and suffering.

My father had sudden death.  One morning, we have just woke up to find out his demise.  He had this so called “bangungot” in our local language which unfortunately no English translation.  It is described as a person died while asleep.  He had no obvious signs of illness prior to his death but medical associates this to heart failure which means my father had heart attack during the moment of his death.  We assume there is pain since it is not death in natural way but our consolation is that he was not suffered for a long time.  I think if we will be given a chance to choose our way to leave our earthly body, we would rather die without difficulty.  Or maybe it is about time to change our impression in death.  If we do not think death is painful that the moment of dying is painless, everybody would wish to die than to be beaten by illness, cruel of life and violence.  Or why don't we look death in a positive way?  Let us look at the brighter side, maybe this is the best for both the dead to receive the life after death and the bereaved to live the stronger, braver and better you.