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During my last visit to New York City, on the way to Manhattan I saw a cemetery that seemed to go on forever, tens of thousands of gravestones standing shoulder to shoulder like ghostly witnesses to the reality of death. These stones set in green, clean and silent as the attending sunlight, these memorial rocks call to attention the gripping grass, the unknowable sky. It reminded me that at about this time last year, my mother died in Topeka, Kansas. She was 79. This year, Mother's Day was quite a bit different. Also, the dying and death of my mother forced me to consider my own mortality. I'm now the oldest member of my rather large surviving family, and as I joked with my brothers and sisters, "I'm next." Accepting her dying and ultimately her death was something we had to do well in order to handle all the practical aspects, and to maintain our emotional balance through it all. Whenever I think of how hard it is to accept death and dying, I immediately think of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler Ross. Having assisted many terminally ill patients and their families, she observed that in many cases the participants didn’t endure the passage in a psychologically healthy way. They struggled to accept what was happening, and sometimes they weren't successful. Unfortunately, this made the passage for the dying person a difficult and conflicted experience. As she tried to help them, she identified the predictable outlines of a journey towards acceptance, which typically began with denial, anger, bargaining and then depression. The stages are described in her classic book, On Death and Dying (1969). She's also the author of 20 other books. Nine years ago Elisabeth suffered a series of strokes that left her paralyzed, triggering her own journey towards acceptance. The stories in Dr. Ross's book illustrate how hard it is to deal with death. It's probably the most unpleasant thing we can think about. Animals don't think conceptually, so they're incapable of being tormented by it. People, of course, do think about it, and human culture seems to have the covert purpose to deny death. So it's not particularly easy to face these facts when we have to. I knew a widow who, over twenty years after the death of her husband, had still not fully accepted his death. It's a hard thing to confront. As a surviving family member, thinking about the journey towards acceptance made Mom's dying easier for me. My goal was to work my way towards accepting this thing that I could do nothing about, so I could be there for the people who depend on me, and so I could get back to handling all the other challenges of my life. This experience caused me to think that while acceptance is crucial, individuals negotiate this passage in different ways. My personal inclination was to move towards acceptance of the loss as quickly as possible. It was as if I skipped denial, anger and bargaining altogether. I moved quickly to acceptance, and I let sadness and mourning happen on their own schedule.
Article Source: http://www.articledestination.com
Dennis E. Coates is CEO of Performance Support Systems, author of MindFrames, a brain-based personality assessment system (www.initforlife.com) and co-founder of the Train-to-Ingrain alliance (www.train-to-ingrain.com, info@train-to-ingrain.com, 800-488-6463), which delivers a reinforcement-centered approach to learning and development that achieves permanent, measurable improvements in workplace behavior and positive impacts on business results.
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