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How Our Death Avoidant Culture Is Killing Us
Our fear and anxiety of death is causing more harm than good
At this writing, it has been five weeks since my father’s death. I’m still having trouble processing the loss. Even though my relationship with him was complicated, a part of me hoped that he would always be an anchor in my life. Now that he’s gone, navigating the shift in my identity from a daughter to someone who has lost her father is unnerving.
The circumstances of my father’s death
I wasn’t with my father when he passed. The morning of my father’s death, I received a phone call from the hospital. He’d been admitted there two weeks previously because the doctor at the nursing home he’d lived in the last four years of his life thought he’d detected rectal bleeding.
The hospital later informed me that the bleeding wasn’t from his rectum but from an infected bed sore on his back. My father developed bedsores throughout his body over the last few weeks of his life and couldn’t find a comfortable position to rest. His discomfort is the thing about his death I regret the most.
The doctor who contacted me the morning of my father’s death stated that they were unable to give him the dialysis that kept him alive for the previous nine years because of his low blood pressure. They’d have…
