A dead body doesn’t look real. The stillness and one’s denial mechanisms combine to make it look like a mannequin.
When my mother went she had an aggressive immune therapy to fight lymphoma. That’s what actually killed her. Ended up looking like 3rd degree burns all over, unconscious and shivering… didn’t look like her.
Also, if the person has a protracted fight with a disease or simply old age (ie anything that isn’t a sudden death) they rarely look like themselves. One elderly family member had an open casket and I could barely recognize them, they wasted away to half of their normal size.
Death can come to anyone at any time and unless you live to be 150 years old it will always seem like you didn’t get enough time, so it’s best not to worry about it.
I’m in a line of work where I see death very very often.
I don’t know what I’ve learned from it. Besides that it’s coming. I also know there are things worse than death. Often, in the end, people/families can’t accept it, and they end up uselessly suffering.
I suspect the suffering is often compounded by certain cultural beliefs and practices, that (arguably) have less healthy outlooks on death or approaches to grieving. Western countries rooted in puritanical belief systems immediately come to mind.
Absolutely. Especially those who believe in miracles.
Whelp, I’ve got cancer. It’s the second time I’ve had it. About 9 months ago I was told the docs would treat me but I probably wouldn’t make it.
Its been a hell of a time.
It’s a blood cancer so at the moment I look normal from the outside. I’ve changed a lot though, in the sense that I’ve become more me.
I don’t give a shit about anything except for spending time with people I like. I especially don’t care about money or work.
It (death) is taking a lot longer to happen than I thought it would.
The real trip has been seeing other people’s reactions; I accepted it early on but other people have had very different reactions. Mostly I think they just don’t know how to react, or they don’t think it will actually happen, or both.
I don’t think the human mind is capable of understanding the concepts of “eternity” or “oblivion” very well.
I do believe in God but it’s still scary.
Its the everyday things that catch you off guard; the other day I was wondering when the next soccer world cup would be, then I realised I probably wouldn’t be around for it.
I think when I finally die it will be a relief from all the physical pain.
I had to watch my dad’s being and body melt over 12 months dying of Glioblastoma.
And people just don’t get that.
I often think that as my body wastes away it will be a lot harder for the people around me than it will be for me.
They will have to watch it happen knowing they can’t help, whereas once I’m gone I won’t have to deal with the sadness and aftermath.
Sorry you had to deal with that.
4 years ago next week marks my mom’s diagnosis and the 10 months that followed. Watching your loved ones go slowly insane and become unable to speak and move in such a short time (she was mid 50s) when they should be healthy changes you. Everything I look at, everything I think about is now looked at under a different lense. And given my age, there just aren’t a lot of people around me who have any idea what it’s like and assume it’s just handling the pain.
Like… no. I’m different now.
Luckily I have a good therapist.
Who lost his sister to it.
Doesn’t help that my brother also died of a heroin overdose (just 5 months before diagnosis ).
My mom moved away after Dad died to live near her sister… Which I understand. But dam I feel abandoned.
Also sometime in between I got a fibromyalgia diagnosis. So in also grieving my old life/body. Bleh. Hugs 🫂
Damn you’ve had it hard. I hope you find some joy in life, you deserve it.
Sorry you had to go through that. I hope you’ve been able to use that experience to make the most of life.
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Fucking hell dude, I wish you all the best there is and to enjoy the ride to the fullest while it lasts, which I hope it does for a long time.
Thanks :)
I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this, it sounds like you have as great an attitude about it as possible though. If it’s too personal don’t feel obligated to answer, but I’m genuinely curious how you accepted it? Since my dad passed away several years ago I’ve become intensely afraid of dying. Like to the point I know I need to talk to someone about it. But I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts/ journey there
It’s a tough question to answer, as it has been a very long and winding road, as they say.
I’ve had chronic health issues for most of my life, so thinking about dying isn’t new. Plus I’ve even had cancer before, so I really thought about it then.
I think time is the main factor. Just sitting with the idea, being comfortable with it, not struggling against it, recognising that it happens to us all, some sooner than others, and that’s OK.
When I feel upset or anxious about death I don’t push it away, I focus on my breathing and tell myself that not only is it totally OK to feel this way, but it’s completely normal. I imagine that I’m swimming in the ocean and a wave has lifted me up. I don’t need to do anything, just relax and the wave will pass through me, and I’ll still be there afterwards.
Early on into my relapse I got high (weed) and my brain took me to this place where I imagined life without me in it. Kind of like a ghost, watching everyone react before slowly getting back into their daily lives. I cried a lot that night but since then I’ve been a lot calmer and accepting of it.
Yes, people will be sad but they will ultimately be OK. Everything will continue as normal once I’m gone, and that’s a good thing.
Today is the shitty anniversary of my brothers death from AML. He was sick for 3 years and its was good at times and then really hard.
He was already one of the most philosophical people I knew when he got sick. Social Security allowed him to have the time with his friends and family when he was deemed unable to work which really helped the whole process.
We got to drive across the US for the eclipse which happened during his last spell of better health (it was an upswing after a marrow transplant that ultimately failed). I’m taking my 6 year old and wife wherever we need to too see the eclipse this April. So I can show my son what his uncle and I saw right before he was born.
Here & now, here & now, here & now, I chant in my head as that’s all we have.
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As a fellow homestead owner I agree. There is no god. I was driving a goose to the emergency vet when she died in my passenger seat. It wasn’t…peaceful. Also have a large graveyard. Life is too short sometimes.
That god isn’t real and religion is a lie. It has made me more of an atheist than I’d ever care to proclaim and even more interested in science.
It’s a shame though, right? I wish they’d all be correct and there was an afterlife where we’d all live together forever in peace and harmony.
I’ve been the spiteful knowitall atheist for the longest time, but seriously… I wish I was wrong.
I hear you, I wish I believed in something, I’d give anything to know there’s an afterlife and I’ll see everyone again. I can’t force it though, wouldn’t work if it’s not an authentic belief. But man it sounds so comforting
Death itself isn’t necessarily the worst part of dying. In many ways, it’s the most merciful part, that can free a person of their suffering.
I took care of my Dad for some years before he passed away, after it became apparent that he was losing his mental faculties and having physical problems after he had had a stroke. It was a slow & steady decline, month after month, just seeing him lose the ability to do regular, basic things.
At some point, his personality died and the person I knew was gone long before the physical body died. He turned into a zombie of sorts, just wanting cigarettes & soda, those were the only things he wanted anymore to the exclusion of everything else. I felt powerless to do anything about it, I helped him as best I could, but years of him smoking and eating/drinking like crap had caught up with him finally.
I am to my knowledge still alive, meaning that I don’t have any experience with being dead.
Grief…doesn’t motivate you. In movies, guys like me, people who have had loved ones killed through prejudices and big evil organizations 🐘 do something about it. Whether that’s activism or something more illegal. But I was way more aggressive about my political views before my girlfriend died. Now it’s like…I can’t muster up the ability to give enough of a shit to do more than vote.
Grief affects people differently. I’m not going to go to into what happened to me, but it definitely motivated me and I’ve been a camp counselor (week long camp counselor, not a licensed or practiced one). I’ve seen a mix of (mostly) kids but still some adults during my volunteering. Rule one is still “you don’t know how they’re going to take it”.
I used to think I wanted whatever possible done to keep me alive. Use the machines, keep me in the coma for years, what have you. Maybe someday they’ll fix me.
My grandmother had a pretty massive stroke. She had some sort of living will, Do Not Resuscitate, something like that, but none of the family could really bring themselves to enforce that so they put a temporary feeding tube in and I think when that reached its limit switched to a more permanent variety.
I can’t remember if she woke up before or after the second feeding tube, but she did wake up in just a couple days; the stroke happened on a Friday and she was definitely awake the next week. She said she was glad they did the feeding tube.
However, while she was still able to talk pretty well, she lost her ability to swallow. Not only could she not eat anything and had to stay on the feeding tube, she couldn’t even drink anything or she risked it going into her lungs. Every time she felt her throat get dry she had to have a nurse with a wet sponge come moisten her throat. They tried electroshock therapy, but it never helped. She described it as the worst torture she’d ever felt and wouldn’t wish it on her worst enemy, but continued trying it because there wasn’t any other alternative from the doctors and it’s really hard to live and not be able to swallow.
She spent months like this, back and forth between the hospital and rehab/nursing centers, doing better but then getting sick in the homes and having to go back to the higher care of the hospital. She never returned to her own home except for a couple hours when one of her sons took her just to see it. In the end one of those times in a nursing home she got sick and started vomiting, some of which went in her lungs and led to her death in just a day or two. All those preceding months of suffering seemed like a waste, just delaying the inevitable.
I don’t want everything possible done to keep me alive anymore. I don’t want to die, but sometimes there are worse things than dying.
My experiences with death has cured me of any atheist delusions. There’s a damn good reason they say, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” It’s not about whether you believe this or that to be real or not real - that is irrelevant - it’s about what matters in those horrible moments people experience true mortality before they go. It’s not pretty like they pretend it to be in the movies, and armchair philosophizing doesn’t mean squat to people then.
People react differently, sure, some will call out to some higher power even if they don’t believe, if these call-outs are part of their vocabulary. I certainly say “oh god” a lot, even though I’m a very vocal anti-theist and strong atheist. But they do not necessarily beg a higher power to safe them because they actually believe, but because in distress reaching for help is human instinct and our theism infused culture conditions us towards “god” in such situations.
I’m not proud of it, but in distress I did call to god for help. But hey, I was 11 years old and just had my fingers crushed to paste, I was in shock and not thinking and at no point did I actually expect help.
None of that is belief, as soon as peoole regain their senses, they discard it. Just like wounded soldiers on a battlefield don’t actually expect their mothers to show up and safe them, yet still call out to them.
Belief needs conviction and irrational panic behavior tells us nothing about conviction but a lot about ingrained childhood experience and familial as well as societal indoctrination.
I’m not proud of it, but in distress I did call to god for help
Doesn’t sound like the actions of a “strong atheist” (if such a thing can or should even exist) to me… just sounds like bog-standard human behavior.
But hey, I was 11 years old
But you’ve left all of that behind, right? You’re a big, strong, rational main character now that will never be put into such a vulnerable situation ever again, right?
None of that is belief,
Perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t - and that probably isn’t even relevant.
as soon as peoole regain their senses, they discard it.
When I cease to be hungry I stop eating - that doesn’t mean I reject the concept of food.
Just like wounded soldiers on a battlefield don’t actually expect their mothers to show up and safe them, yet still call out to them.
In other words… atheist reasoning only works as long as everything is comfortable and non-threatening? It offers absolutely nothing to those in distress?
I’d say that’s a big, gaping hole in said reasoning.
Belief needs conviction
So does non-belief, apparently. At least, that’s what the narratives I hear from atheists seem to suggest.
Depends… is it big enough to fill the giant gap in atheist reasoning?
No offense, but “No atheists in foxholes” ONLY makes sense to religious people… why would an atheist pray to something he/she doesn’t believe in? Do Christians pray to Muhammad or one of the thousands of other religions in foxholes? Of course not, because they don’t believe in them… that’s the point. If someone is doing that, they’re at best agnostic.
And for the record, I’ve had one of my daughters literally die in my arms, it’s a terrible experience, but it didn’t convert me to some religion to try and make sense out of.
No offense,
None taken.
but “No atheists in foxholes” ONLY makes sense to religious people
I’m afraid not. I’m not religious at all - and it makes perfect sense to me.
why would an atheist pray to something he/she doesn’t believe in?
It’s very easy to convince yourself that you’ve chosen to believe this or that when life is comfortable. It’s peak individualism - and such delusions fall apart very fast when the trauma starts piling on. You don’t have to believe me - believe the people who wrote the CIA’s torture manuals.
It’s called “regression” - if you were spoon-fed a certain religion as a child you will “regress” to that under extreme duress (amongst other, even worse, things). That’s why they say, “there are no atheists in foxholes.”
if you were spoon-fed a certain religion as a child
And if you weren’t? Probably hard to believe for most Americans but atheism isn’t an invention of the current generations.
but atheism isn’t an invention of the current generations.
Of course it isn’t.
And if you weren’t?
That’s actually a very difficult thing… even someone who was raised in a non-religious home would be exposed to religion (and things worse than religion under our current circumstances) through social osmosis. Soooo… you’d have to find someone that was raised in a society that can be called atheist with a straight face.
Wow this is a stupid take. I was spoon fed Christianity, now I’m agnostic. I’ve experienced plenty of traumatic things and I haven’t found myself praying to God in any of those.
Where did you get this is bs?
Where did you get this
I guess you missed this part?
You don’t have to believe me - believe the people who wrote the CIA’s torture manuals.
I suppose you were too busy convincing yourself that losing at video games qualify as “traumatic…”
You don’t know me at all, dipshit. Congratulations for being the most insufferable Lemmy user I’ve ran into so far. I feel sorry for people that know you. That has to be traumatic.
You don’t know me at all
I agree. And I’d prefer to keep it that way.
most insufferable
Considering how easy it was to trigger you I find your claim of any kind of actual life experience quite dubious.
You make an awful lot of assumptions. Keep being a basement keyboard warrior, loser.
This is all going straight over your head, isn’t it?
I guess it must be “going over my head”, because it makes no sense to me to pray to something that isn’t there, unless you at least think there’s at least a tiny chance there is… aka agnostic.
I also wouldn’t pray to my toaster unless I thought at least there was the slightest chance it could hear me.
because it makes no sense
So everything in your life “makes sense”? How did you accomplish that?
I also wouldn’t pray to my toaster unless
I also wouldn’t recommend praying to anything that comes with an on/off switch… though I am undecided about threatening them with banishment to a landfill.
I never said everything in life makes sense, just that praying to something you don’t think is real doesn’t.
Obviously you believe in some form of higher power, so it makes sense that you would pray to it. But you wouldn’t pray to something you don’t at least think has a chance of existing, why would you think an atheist would?
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Don’t go too fast on roads you haven’t ridden your motorcycle on before.
Though, a friend died on the same road after avoiding a pothole and striking a car, the trailer ran over his chest. He was teaching a new young rider the ropes and wasn’t going fast. The pothole formed over the last few months he hadn’t been up there. The local council denied it existed. We rode up and took a photo for the local news and a truck was there about to fill it in as we arrived. It was shallow but took almost half the lane on a blind corner.
