Exposure to Death

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“Death is the debt every man must pay”, wrote Euripides. Each day we are reminded about death; a report on the television about starving children in Africa or a suicide bomber in the Middle East. Headline in the newspaper about a murder, suicide or “honor killings”; News of an untimely death from a loved one, friend, co-worker. It seems that death is everywhere. Until this essay was assigned I had never really thought about how death had affected me, or how close I was to that deceased person who had died so suddenly, sometimes without even saying goodbye. Now thinking about it I have actually been around death quite a bit in my short life so far; a long with that I have sat through many sad funerals. How close I was to that person is a whole other story though. Even when it comes to my own family I wasn’t always that close to them when they passed on because they lived in another state, or my parents weren’t very close to them so I wasn’t really ever around them enough to know them or develop an attachment. (1A) In my life according to the survey I took about exposures I wrote down about fifty or so people, and of those fifty I have developed an attachment with over half of those people. Thinking about that that is quite a bit of attachments to develop in my life so far, I mean if even one of those people that aren’t deceased already passed away tomorrow then some part of my life would change somewhat significantly. The people that are alive today that I have developed some sort of a bond with is in my opinion a pretty significant amount. I have around 20-30 attachments that are still living today between my friends, family, and significant other. When I divided the number of people I wrote down on my survey (1A) by the number ... ... middle of paper ... ...r was that I was afraid of death, and not being able to say goodbye to people before I died. After doing this paper it has made me realize that I have dealt with that all of my life and I am not as afraid of that as I originally thought. So if I had to rewrite anything I would say that although it does scare me I am not afraid of not saying goodbye to people before I pass on. Much of the pain of death for the living comes from a sense of loss. It marks an end to all the possibilities both for us and for the departed that might have been realized by a longer life. Overall even though death is a sad thing it is part of the reason I am the person I am today. It has made me realize that I need to develop stronger relationships now so I don’t have any regrets if they had suddenly passed on. I have found out that I can’t make amends for anything after a person is gone.

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