HW 17 - First Thoughts On the Illness & Dying Unit.

    Personally I have a very unhappy relationship with the topic of Illness & Dying but I do not wish to unravel that mesh of stories right now. Although I'm willing to discuss what I have been taught since my youth about Illness & Dying. I've been taught that Illness is a bad thing and it must be treated very seriously especially in my family. Whenever anyone gets sick even the slightest bit we all do our best to help that person get better as soon as possible. Attention, care, time, and any amount of money required will automatically be found and used to assist that member in my family to get better whenever they are ill. Thats just the way I grew up and it will never change, at least I think so. As for Dying it's a touchy topic for my family. Like any other family in America whenever anyone dies in our family there's an immediate funeral and celebration of their life to and a last chance to honor their life and create remembrance.

    I believe the social norms of Illnesses & Dying are as follows; you get ill we try to make you better, if you die we bury you and have a funeral to honor and remember you; to me the social norms are as simple as that. My own family's approach to these aspects in life is that they take them in and try to make them better by attempting to take better care of each other and trying to further celebrate our lost loved ones through funerals and wakes. As for some unusual perspectives I have about being sick and/or dying are that the actual action of dying is unusual to me. Think about dying period, people die every day but can you really understand it? A life, someone's life just up and ending, can you imagine it, could you endure it? How can people live with the fact everyday that any of us could die at any moment? This is what I find unusual, how death is constantly at our door step and we just accept it in life and attempt to live on like everything is going to be fine. But eventually until that fateful judgment day it won't be. The abrupt act of death is a roll of the dice to me that I believe nobody wants to drop.