Death and Dying

7 Key excerpts on "Death and Dying"

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  Understanding the Life Course

  Sociological and Psychological Perspectives

  • Lorraine Green(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  8

  Death, Dying, Grief and Loss

  Introduction

  Death is the one final inevitability in our lives, even more inescapable than paying taxes, and we are the only species who has any understanding of death. Our ancestors accepted death as an everyday communal part of life and were psychologically and physically very close to it, but we confront death today far less frequently, publicly or personally. In our often urbanized, fragmented and impersonal Western societies, religion, the family and the community now play a smaller role in explaining and handling death than in previous eras. Improved environmental conditions and medical technology have led to greater longevity. People often die in hospital or, when someone dies unexpectedly, the body is immediately removed to the funeral directors or coroners. This institutionalized medicalization and bureaucratization of death shields us from most aspects of it, alongside its less obvious occurrence. We consequently often find death threatening and an affront to the emphasis we place on youth, vitality, beauty and the value of the individual. The positing of bereavement grief as potentially deviant or pathological, furthermore, leaves many people fearful about how they will or should react when someone close to them dies.

  Psychology and sociology examine different aspects related to Death and Dying. Psychology engages primarily with the emotional experience of the dying or bereaved individual whereas sociology concentrates on the impact of social and historical contexts on how death is perceived and responded to. Psychological theories relating to grief and loss, however, do not pertain exclusively to bereavement. One may grieve during a relationship breakdown or after a shift from a valued way of life to one potentially less valued. Asylum seekers, for example, may suffer grief and multiple losses associated with leaving behind home, family, culture and nation, further exacerbated by possible past traumatizing experiences of war, persecution or diminishing health. This may be exacerbated even more by racism, bureaucratic asylum processes and loss of status and a valued role in the host country. However, in this chapter bereavement acts as a key exemplar of grief and loss theories. The chapter initially appraises traditional and contemporary psychological perspectives, followed by the sociological ‘take’, later synthesizing them to present a more coherent, interdisciplinary understanding of grief, loss, Death and Dying.

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  Death and Dying

  Sociological Perspectives

  • Gerry R. Cox, Neil Thompson(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1Sociological Understandings of Death and Dying

  Introduction

  This opening chapter explores some key issues in relation to death education and related matters. It helps us understand how various thinkers have made a contribution to the gradual development of an approach to Death and Dying informed by sociology and the broader perspective it brings to the subject matter. It sets the scene for the chapters that follow.

  In order to establish the important role of sociology in developing an adequate understanding of Death and Dying, we highlight a number of important issues. First, we explore the social nature of Death and Dying before moving on to consider how suicide, generally regarded as a very private, individualistic matter, is actually a profoundly social (and thus sociological) phenomenon.

  We then examine the important topic of gender differences in grieving and the social processes involved. This leads us into a discussion of social support where we emphasize the important role it plays in responding to the challenges of Death and Dying.

  The Social Nature of Death and Dying

  One of the topics sociologists study is the social behavior of groups and networks of people. However, sociology is also concerned with individual experience. This is because it too has a social dimension. The concept of “social” means that there is more than one person involved but, significantly, even individuals who are alone also typically behave in response to the expectations of others; the social dimension is “internalized” – it becomes part of our lives. While dying is perhaps one of the most personal things that an individual will do, it is also decidedly a social act. It is not just a biological act or a personal event; it is a social phenomenon that affects the people who are a part of our social network. Similarly, whether we die alone or in the presence of others, our death is not just an individual act – others are deeply affected by it. This extends beyond the immediate family to include parts of the local community, the workplace and sometimes beyond. For example, the grief relating to the death of a well-loved teacher could extend to generations of former students.

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  Grief Education for Caregivers of the Elderly

  • Harold G Koenig, Junietta B Mccall(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4Death and Dying and the Elderly

  A third essential focus of grief education for caregivers of the elderly must be on the grief concerning contemplation of personal death. In no other age group is this issue a normative characteristic. Its role in the lives of the elderly is fraught with complex social, spiritual, and personal expectations. We who care for the elderly persons in our midst will never know for sure what this is like, until we are also aged and facing death. For this reason, it is imperative that we understand the process of grieving one’s own imminent death in its normative pattern.

  Death and Society

  Dying can be considered a personal, social, and cultural event. Often, what is experienced on a personal level is mirrored by social, cultural, and religious teachings. Every society has ways of teaching its members about dying and death. Some of our foci are the disposal of the body, disposal of the estate, support for the bereaved, and role allocation for family, job, and community, if necessary.

  Death, we say, is the end of life, and we use medical criteria such as cessation of breathing, heartbeat, and pulse, as well as the onset of rigor mortis, marking the beginning of decomposition, and necrosis to identify it. Other criteria may be used to describe death. One such criterion is the departure of the soul from the physical body. Another criterion may be the degree of psychosocial and body function control. Clinical, social, psychological, anthropological, civil, and spiritual definitions of death have their own discipline-specific criteria.

  Dying and the Individual

  People who are in their older years die mainly because of physiological complications. For example, they may get pneumonia, and this, added to their other medical problems, leads to death. They may have a sudden heart attack and die. Elderly widowers are vulnerable to suicide, perhaps as a complication of grief. Others die from accidents and from a lack of will to live. We must not forget that there are different causes of death in old age, as in other stages of life. However, most old people die due to one or more chronic diseases or from multiple complications.

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  Issues in Aging

  • Mark Novak(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Have you discussed death within your family? Do people in your family or among your friends talk about a “good” death, about their preferences for burial or cremation, or about their feelings about Death and Dying? This chapter looks at death in old age. It focuses on (1) attitudes toward death and on where death takes place, (2) ethical questions about Death and Dying, and (3) mourning and grief.

  Death and Society

  Social attitudes toward death fall on a continuum. Some societies see death as an enemy, something people fight with all their power. Other societies welcome death and even see it as a transition to a better, even blissful, world. Still others see death as a mystery.

  Kastenbaum (1999, p. xv) said he misses the old days—“the really old days.” In the ancient past, he said, people saw death as a mysterious transition. They created myths and stories to explain death to themselves. The Greek Hades, the Christian Heaven or Hell, and the Muslim Paradise all show humans grappling with the meaning of death. For some societies, death meant an eternity of darkness and shadow. For others, as Dante describes in his Inferno , it could mean punishment for an evil life. And for Muslims, death means a life of ease and pleasure for believers. As Kastenbaum said, “Death was clearly something BIG.” The power of the stories, their central role in religion and culture, tell us that people have always wondered about death.

  But times have changed, and we have a new view of Death and Dying (one that coexists with some of our traditional views). Science and technology extend life and push Death and Dying to late old age.

  Death remains abstract and foreign to most of us. We see graphic scenes of death in the movies and on television, but these images distance us from death. They have little impact on our daily lives. We can turn off the television or leave the theater if the images scare or depress us. We rarely have a direct experience of death.

  Today, death challenges our moral and ethical codes. Our legal system grapples with the issue of physician-assisted suicide, our health care system deals with the long trajectory toward death that we call long-term care, and families cope with institutions such as hospitals and nursing homes where death most often occurs.

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  Death, Society, and Human Experience

  • Robert Kastenbaum, Christopher M. Moreman(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The “moment of death” is still being nurtured by compassionate health-care providers. Valentine (2008) reports that few of the terminally ill patients in her study were known to have offered last words. However, some patients “took charge of their own dying and leave-taking” and recovered their own characteristic selfhood (p. 83).

  In this chapter, we consider dying not so much as an abstraction but as an experience that takes many forms, depending on the nature and management of the illness, the social support system available, and the unique person whose life is in jeopardy. How and when we die is influenced by societal practices as well as physical disorders. For example, it has been found that hospitalized patients are more likely to die when members of either an understaffed nursing (Aiken, Clarke, Sloane, Sochalski, & Silber, 2002) or medical (Provonost et al., 2002) service have excessive demands on their time and energies. But why do hospitals often have fewer nurses and physicians available? Furthermore, why do some of the best academic teaching hospitals provide only minimal care for patients in end-of-life situations and fail to provide end-of-life education for the next generation of physicians (Meier, 2005)? To answer questions such as these we need to become more familiar with the American death system. We will also be touching on how personal lifestyles affect the timing and manner of our deaths. For example, negative emotions have been found to endanger health by undermining or overwhelming our immune systems (Kiecolt-Glaser, McGuire, Robles, & Glaser, 2002). If negative emotions are part of our daily experiences, we are more likely to encounter life-threatening experiences, and more likely to lose that battle. It is unlikely that we can understand dying by focusing only on the fact of death itself: We must also consider the total pattern and meaning of the life that has and is being lived, and which is coming to an end.

  Dying as Transition

  Dying is one of many transitions that we experience in our lives. This means that we can call upon what we already know from other transitional situations. We are already “practicing death” with bedtime rituals in childhood and in other temporary separations of daily life (Kastenbaum, 2004; Chapter 10

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  Thinking about the Lifecourse

  A Psychosocial Introduction

  • Elizabeth Frost, Stuart McClean(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  More than that, many of the perspectives that focus exclusively on the psyche, the inner experience of grief, ignore the importance and enduring significance of death and grief in the context of social relationships. Depending on the nature of these social relationships, as well as issues to do with class and ethnicity, this will impact variably on the individual lived experience of grief. We must also place in a social context in the West, which holds the view that death is an embarrassment in a society that privileges and valorizes the place of youth and vitality. The sociologist Tony Walter has taken what has been called the postmodern perspective on death and grief (Walter, 2001; Klass and Walter 2001) and, along with the work of Klass, Silverman and Nickman on ‘continuing bonds’ represented a welcome change from the classic Western grief theory (Klass et al., 1996; Árnason, 2012). For Walter (2001) our psychosocial experience of death is permeated by contradictory and paradoxical influences: on the one hand we have a cultural aversion to and deep-seated fear of death, yet at the same time we have a view that sees loss of a loved one as unbearable. These are the social and cultural contexts that frame how death, dying and in particular bereavement, is experienced. The work of the sociologist Walter has contributed to this debate in terms of what he has called the biographical model and the individualization of loss (i.e. there is no overarching grief process). In this the grieving person, rather than seeking to move on and accept through the ‘emotion work’ of bereavement counselling, seeks to give permanence to their memories of the dead person by constructing a biography of those memories in its narrative retelling. This involves talking to as many people as possible who had connection to that person

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  The SAGE Encyclopedia of Abnormal and Clinical Psychology

  • Amy E. Wenzel(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Death Denial, our unique human capacity to anticipate and reflect on our own mortality inevitably generates death anxiety. To protect our physical and psychological integrity, death avoidance has become a basic and universal human motivation. Much of human behavior is shaped by this motivation, because death anxiety can threaten our physical and psychological integrity in various ways.

  As an umbrella concept, death anxiety encompasses numerous painful emotions, such as fear of the painful process of dying, a sense of despair and hopelessness regarding the inevitability of death, concern about the unknown after physical death, and the terror of the prospect of annihilation and separation. Death anxiety can be compounded when we witness the gruesome mayhem of wars, terrorism, and natural disasters on news broadcasts. The pain of the actual loss of a loved one can be more difficult to bear than anticipated personal death; some people have reported that it is like living with a part of their heart ripped out and they cannot find anything to fill the hole in their lives.

  In spite of all our defense mechanisms, there seems to be no solution for our fear of death. Attempts to numb our existential anxiety through distractions and addictions sometimes intensify our sense of vulnerability and the pain of our inner void. Embeddedness in intimate relationship networks can both protect us and torment us, because the greater the intimacy, the greater the pain of loss; yet we cannot find a solution to this inherent conflict.

  The Negative Effects of Death Denial

  Much of human drama, at both individual and cultural levels, reflects our attempts at death denial. From mummies to pyramids, memorials to monuments, myths to religions, hospitals to funeral services, down through history, we have developed institutions, rituals, and symbolic immortality systems to shield us from the reality of death threat. We even engage in aggression and war when our cultural immortality systems are threatened.

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