My Death Experience

My Death Experience

Death is defined as “the act of dying; the end of life; the total and permanent cessation of all the vital functions of an organism” (The American Heritage, 2007). Death is inevitable to all. It is the end of the cycle that began with life. Every individual experiences and reacts to death in their own way. An individual’s reactions to a death experience are recognized as a process, referred to as grieving (Myers, 2007). Grief is defined as “ intense sorrow caused by loss of a loved one (especially by death)” (WordNet, 2007). Grief has five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Denial is usually the first stage in the grieving process. It is usually experienced as one’s inability to believe that the loss is true. Anger is another stage in the grieving process and is related to an individual feeling angry about the loss they are experiencing. The bargaining stage of grief pertains to an individual trying to come up with ways to get back what they lost. Examples of bargaining include requests to God asking ‘ “If I do this, will you take away the loss?” ‘(The Stages of Grief, 2006, p. 1). The depression stage is a time of sadness. And the acceptance stage is when the individual accepts that the loss is real (The Stages of Grief, 2006).

My first experience of death was with my grandmother. Her death was almost immediate and totally unexpected. To further elaborate on what I mean by almost immediate and unexpected is that, my grandmother lived alone, appeared healthy, and just happened to be feeling under the weather for a couple of days. She believed that she had a touch of the flu. Then, out of the clear blue, my parents received a telephone call stating that my grandmother was being transported to Loyola Hospital by helicopter.

Immediately my family and I rushed to Loyola Hospital where the physicians there

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informed my family and me that there was nothing that could be done for my grandmother, and she was going to die. The doctor explained that her intestines had ruptured and all of her waste products spilled into her system causing a severe infection, called sepsis. The physicians felt that the infection