At the start of the new year, as well as setting up my business I am wanting to do some volunteering. Yesterday I was invited to have a look around a centre specifically for cancer patients.
During a sort of pre-interview, one of the questions was "how do you cope with death?" What a question. I immediately thought of my Grandparents as well as my aunt who died very young and tried to remember what I was like and how I felt at the time. The answer is that I was in bad way and the grieving process was very long particularly with my young aunt who could have been saved by doctors if they hadn't made so many errors. However aren't those symptoms of grief the same for everyone? I didn't know how to answer the lady's question, so the woman said to me "however hard you try not to, you do become attached to some of the patients and when you have been helping a patient and the following day you arrive at the hospital to find that you are greeted by an empty bed because they have died overnight or even if they die whilst you are helping them, how would you deal with it?" I wished that I had answered the first question as this question was even harder to answer. I was also told that most therapists did not want to work on the actual wards partly due to this. However that is the role I would most like to undertake. How is it that most of the patients are inspirational and relatively happy despite the fact that they have been given an approximate date in which they will die? Why are people without life limiting conditions so scared of death? Is it because we feel that we have the rest of our long life to do things whilst someone who is dying wants to make the best of the time they have left and try to fit in as much as they can?
Whatever our religion, beliefs and race, there is one thing that we can all agree which is that there are two main stages in life, birth and death. They are natural processes. At some point we will all die. As a result of recent circumstances I am not afraid of death, the unknown or even whether there is any possibility of life after death.
Having read this post, you are probably thinking what a gloomy and somber post I have written. Someone once said to me 'live each day as though it is your last, embracing every moment as if it were your last'. If you were to follow that quote, what would you do?
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