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‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

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Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#51

Post by dgacmu »

brianjking wrote: post #2

This article seems like something I should read, but I'm not sure if I want to. As someone with parents and inlaws who are in their early to mid 70s and quite worried about losing them, I'm not sure if I'm ready to read this. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?

My mom passed last may. She'd been having some health problems for the preceding few months and I'd gotten in the habit of calling her daily just to check in briefly. I'm grateful I did; my biggest feeling for months after she died was that I regretted not being able to talk to her any more. I do still wish I'd gotten her to talk more about her stories, but having made a conscious effort to keep even more in touch helped me a lot - particularly coming after not seeing her in person for two years due to the pandemic.

Tl;dr: consciously manage your relationship. implement a plan to be in contact regularly at a frequency that works for you and them, and stick to it. It will help reduce the "if only I had" kind of regrets. Grief still hurts, but that's normal and ok.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#53

Post by f_allwein »

brianjking wrote: post #2

This article seems like something I should read, but I'm not sure if I want to. As someone with parents and inlaws who are in their early to mid 70s and quite worried about losing them, I'm not sure if I'm ready to read this. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?

Read up on stoicism, e.g. A Guide to the Good Life by William Irvine, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5617966-a-guide-to-the-g...

The key idea, iirc, is to regularly meditate on/ imagine the loss of everyone and everything you hold dear. On one hand, you’ll appreciate them more afterwards, on the other, it is good practice to prepare for actual losses.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#54

Post by oldstrangers »

No one probably wants to hear this but my partner's grandmother was in hospice. Her grandmother had so much anxiety about dying (she was in her late 90s) that the hospice just kept her doped up with morphine 24/7 (this is a lot more common than you'd imagine). When she was sober enough to realize what was happening she'd just scream.

Anyway, that really did a number on me for the next few months. Seeing someone so distraught having reached the end of their life, clearly unhappy with everything that had led up to that point, unable to really accept that this was the end. Was profoundly depressing but also extremely motivating to not waste my time on things I'm not happy with.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#55

Post by dedev5 »

robocat wrote: post #45
melling wrote: post #9

“30 years ago I would have died of cancer; now I will die with cancer, but not of cancer.” And 30-100 years from now, the same cancer will be cured. It’s simply a matter of the human race deciding when to cure cancers.

Simply? Cancer is because cells do not copy their data exactly - sometimes because the copying process is imperfect and introduces faults, and sometimes because viruses introduce faults. There is a stupidly large number of different copying faults, so there is a stupidly large number of possible types of cancer. Cancer is entirely dissimilar to many other diseases of the body. To cure cancer requires either preventin…

Removing viruses from our environment would make our immune systems much weaker to the viruses that inevitably get through, no?

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#56

Post by night-rider »

brianjking wrote: post #2

This article seems like something I should read, but I'm not sure if I want to. As someone with parents and inlaws who are in their early to mid 70s and quite worried about losing them, I'm not sure if I'm ready to read this. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?

> Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?

The dead live on, only not in physical form. That is the process of grief. It is the love for that person simply being unexpressed, the love you didn't express when they were alive.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#57

Post by inglor_cz »

melling wrote: post #9

“30 years ago I would have died of cancer; now I will die with cancer, but not of cancer.” And 30-100 years from now, the same cancer will be cured. It’s simply a matter of the human race deciding when to cure cancers.

Compared to current expenditure and human resources spent on treating and understanding cancer, what would constitute a real "decision to cure cancer" for you? Twice as much, ten times as much?

Do billionaires and powerful politicians (or their loved ones) deliberately die of cancer because they collectively decided not to find a cure for cancer?

Are you willing to entertain the idea that we don't yet fully understand cancer or even our own biology, and that said understanding may not be a "simple" function of money and brains, but requires a bit of luck as well?

Most historical breakthroughs in science weren't an outcome of bruteforcing the problem with shitloads of money and manpower. People tend to fixate on the Manhattan Project too much; it is not a great analogy, because by 1940, the understanding of the fundamentals was basically complete.

We don't understand cancer nearly as well as we understood nuclear fission at that time. Hell, we don't understand aging very well yet, and cancer is a typical disease of old age.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#58

Post by labrador »

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody."

I used to work in health care and once there was a patient, and old man, barely alive, groaning and getting ready for hospice. I didn't see any indication, like family pictures, that anyone visited him. The nurse told me "He used to be chief of surgery and head of this hospital." I thought, so this is how it ends for all of us no matter how high and mighty, dying alone, hopefully having made peace with our God.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#59

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

oldstrangers wrote: post #54

No one probably wants to hear this but my partner's grandmother was in hospice. Her grandmother had so much anxiety about dying (she was in her late 90s) that the hospice just kept her doped up with morphine 24/7 (this is a lot more common than you'd imagine). When she was sober enough to realize what was happening she'd just scream. Anyway, that really did a number on me for the next few months. Seeing someone so di…

“At the end of our life our questions are simple: Did I live fully? Did I love well?”

— Jack Kornfield

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#60

Post by brookst »

brianjking wrote: post #2

This article seems like something I should read, but I'm not sure if I want to. As someone with parents and inlaws who are in their early to mid 70s and quite worried about losing them, I'm not sure if I'm ready to read this. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?

IMO the best thing you can do is accept you will lose them, and it may be sudden and unexpected, or it may be slow and awful. I’m sorry, it’s just true, and denial will just make it worse.

Given acceptance of that reality, do the stuff you might wish you had done. Visit more, talk more, listen more. If they’re comfortable with mortality (older people are often moreso than younger), don’t avoid the topic. If they’re not, well, maybe there are small things you can do to help both you and them to accept.

It’s such a difficult thing, but it’s pretty much mandatory. Acceptance can reduce anxiety.

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