Greenleaves,

When we experience death in our life....it is natural to think about it. I know my Mother died this year of cancer & I was with her 24/7 for the last 2 months of her life. It was very sad to know that she was dying without the support of her Dr's or the people around.

She was continually asking me when she was going to get better because she & all her friends at church were praying for her. She never would admit that she was going to die except for a few comments here & there. When I first realized that she was dying, her surgeon kept telling me that he "got it all" in the surgery. How you can be sure that you got all of stage IV cancer is beyond me when it had spread as far as it had. Watching her go down hill & loosing her cognative abilities to think, reason, or even speak was scarry & I learned a lot about how the mind & body works at the end of life.

Her pastor talked to her a bit about dying I think but not knowing how much. Her boyfriend from her church would look at her on a good day & say she is going to get better because she is having a good day......one good day here or there in my mind didn't make any difference in the end result...but no one was willing to hear that.

It was hard for me to tell my daughter (she is 27) that grandma was going to die. They were closer than I was with my Mother. My daughter was my best support of all because after she realized the truth, we could both discuss it & what was going on. My mothers was very strong in her religion & from the time my father had died 16 years before she said that with her beliefs she was ready to die at any point it happened. That was strange because at the end, she fought dying very hard.....I could see her hanging on.....struggling very hard to breath after the cancer had spread to her lungs.....I am also sure that the cancer had spread to her brain because she could no longer understand much of anything. It wasn't until I was finally able to sit down with her & tell her that it was ok for her to die & that she shouldn't fight so hard to live because even if she lived it wouldn't be the kind of life she wanted to live. I told her that Pops was in heaven waiting for her & so were her parents. That once she let go, she no longer would be in pain & that the world she would be going to would be so much more beautiful that here & the things that went on wouldn't follow her there. It seemed that she was fighting to stay in the life she knew rather than to let go for the unknown (death) that her religious belief told her about...death was still the unknown.

The one thing that is constantly on my mind about death is that the choices we make can make a difference in how we die. A friend of mine from college hated to go to Dr's & had many serious health issues that he pushed off without doing anything about it......then when things got really bad, the Dr's started treating the things that were wrong......it was only a couple of weeks before he died that the Dr's determined that it was non-hodgkins lymphomia (cancer) that he had. He chose not to be taken care of & the Dr's didn't know what to look at until it was too late. My mother had noticed a lump in the vulva area.....she didn't want do do anything about it because she had to take her driving test & didn't want to have a surgery for a cyst before the test. She went in & they did a biopsy that showed cancer then was sent to the oncologist surgeon. I went to the appointment with her & the tumor was the size of my fist....(she swore it was the size of a marble 2 months earlier....impossible)...by then it was stage IV & later the surgeon told me that "when she came to me she didn't give me anything to work with". Even when my father died 19 years ago, he had bypass surgery 5 years before......He had a Dr appointment just the week before he died & his medications were changed. He got sick with what seemed like the flu & bronchitis....having a hard time breathing. My mother had decided that he needed to go to the Dr that day but he died of congestive heart failure (fluid around the heart & into the lung) before the appointment.

The aspects around death are definitely scarry......not only the fact that our decisions can determine what our cause of death is & what we have to go through before death, but also the unknown about what is after death. From what I have realized, no matter what our beliefs are, after death is still the unknown & human nature seems to be such that we fight to keep what is known rather than giving into the unknown.

The unknown is the basis for being afraid.....what you are feeling is very normal. I hope I didn't hijack your thread.....didn't mean to do that....only tried to put into words my fears of dying & of the experiences that we go through on the path to our death. These thoughts have been at the top of my mind for the last few years. Reading your thread & with the thoughts I have been experiencing, brought into words the feelings I have been feeling.

Debbie