Death

And people's reactions to it...

Death is something that everyone has to deal with in some form or another in their lives. You will lose people, you will lose pets, and you will die yourself one day. However, this post is not about dealing with the existential dread of death… I can write one like that, but this is not that. Instead, this is about the weird reactions that people have to death, and how shocking those reactions can be.

I am guessing that even if you haven’t had to deal with it directly, you have at least read the stories about how people can become totally different animals when someone is dying. Be that in a good way, meaning a caring way, or be that in a greed-filled sort of demonic way. I have seen a number of different reactions to death, and it can be pretty bizarre to watch from my perspective, it isn’t really an indictment on people either way. I know that the assumptions that people make about their own goodness and the goodness of others are often rather inflated, and that reality tends to be a bit more gritty.

Let’s first talk about some of the good, albeit selfish reactions. I have mentioned this story before. People often speak about terminal patients in words like “brave” or “courageous”, or “inspiring”. Dealing with a terminal illness is messy, and the person suffering, along with their family is not in a movie, they are living real life. The problem with real life is it isn’t clean and nice. Oftentimes it is really ugly.

When dealing with someone who is terminal, it doesn’t change their personality for the better necessarily, and it can very much turn them towards the negative. It can be trying, it can be thankless, and it can make you feel like the person is already gone.

I have seen this in cancer, and I have seen it in dementia where the family is worn to the ends of their nerves, and they are just numb when the end finally arrives. This isn’t a verdict against them, it is a testament to how difficult this sort of situation is to deal with.

I remember one conversation with a guy (we’ll go with Drew for a name) whose twin (we’ll call him James) was dying of cancer and the twin didn’t have an appetite. James was very thin, and Drew wanted him to eat. James was sick, didn’t have an appetite, and was without a doubt terminal. Eating wasn’t going to help him, but Drew wasn’t thinking about it that way.

In Drew’s mind, James not eating was him giving up, and that made him angry. He wasn’t ready to lose his twin, so a fight ensued. Looking back on it now, he understands where he was at, and could take a better approach to his emotional state. Getting angry and being extremely short and frustrated with a home hospice patient was not what he should have done.

It was fear, anger at the situation, grief, rage, and denial that created that response, but really it came down to his love for his brother, and not being ready to face his impending death.

Another example would be a cancer patient that wasn’t a particularly easy to deal with person before getting ill (we’ll call him Frank) and Frank’s family, a dedicated but long-suffering loyal bunch. when Frank got sick, he became more demanding, more unpleasant, and more difficult to placate. He also did hospice at home and ran his family like servants.

Frank was angry he was going to die. He didn’t think that it was fair, and because he was angry, everyone had to suffer with him. His family still loved him. He had provided for them, been the best father and husband he could be, and they were dedicated to making sure his final months were the most comfortable that they could be. That didn’t make it easy. It was completely emotionally destructive, and by the time Frank died, the entire family was more relieved than sad.

In the first story, the twin is dealing with their own emotions. They are trying to stave off the inevitable because it terrifies them. If Drew could get James to eat, he would live a little bit longer, maybe. He isn’t in a place to understand that Drew was ready to go, or at the very least past the notion of trying to save himself. It is said that people know when they are going to die, and Drew was no exception. It was a very difficult transition that wasn’t made any easier by them being identical twins.

In the second story, the person that everyone thought they knew became very different when they were faced with their impending death. Anger is natural and so is fear. I think that even if a person is in their later years, death can still be difficult to contend with, and personality changes are to be expected. Some people can go with grace, others are going to be very cantankerous about the whole process.

Now let’s talk about the other side of things, the vultures and the dismissives. These are the people who will clear out an entire house while the rest of the family is at the funeral. Granted, there are, and should be, strange legal ramifications for doing so, but it doesn’t change the fact that death makes people crazy. Even people who are in a good place financially will suddenly become the most vile greedy people you can imagine. They don’t even bother waiting until the will is read, or sometimes even wait for the person to actually die before they are trying to divvy up the loot.

Something that amazes me every single time is watching them squabble over the still-breathing person about who is going to get what and when. If there is real estate involved people are trying to either sell it or move into it before they have even bothered hearing what the person’s last wishes are. The most remarkable part of it is the entitlement to things or the dismissal of things that aren’t even theirs to start with.

The items and house that they are basically trying to claw each other’s eyes out over do not belong to them by default. Does that stop this?

No, of course, it doesn’t. To anyone that isn’t completely drunk on materialism and can watch this from afar without feeling like they have to clothesline their own mother for a dish set will be perplexed by this behavior. Aren’t these people at least a little bit more humble than this?

What about the people who simply cannot be bothered? They get the phone call that their mother is likely going to expire within the week, but they can’t put off their hair appointment, or their vacation. It is understandable to a degree if they didn’t have a good relationship with their family member, but even those who apparently had a great relationship can’t seem to rearrange their schedule to see them one last time. Why? Because it’s inconvenient for them, and that’s not something that they want to deal with. Then, they will have the audacity to be shocked that they didn’t get there in time. Of course, that means that they will have to blame someone other than themselves for that failure.

When it comes to the vultures, they don’t surprise me. Not one bit. They are a great reminder of why there is the saying:

Civility is an illusion. Savagery is the default state of humanity.

All of these things come back to the same root. Selfishness. As I have said in the past, selfishness is not a bad thing. In the case of Drew and James, it was an inability to lose a person who was loved beyond measure. It clouded Drew’s ability to accept where James was at, and while yes, his insistence that James needed to eat when that was never going to be helpful, the basis for his behavior was to prolong the time that he had left with his other half.

In the case of Frank, this one is self-explanatory. He didn’t want to die and his anger about the situation gave him, in his mind at least, the right to take that anger out on others. He was dying, he was due that as far as he was concerned.

The vultures. I would say these are the worst of the bunch. Squabbling over material things while the person hasn’t even died yet is pretty messed up, but I can almost bet that each one of you has had, or will have a run-in with this sort in your lifetime. The entitlement is pretty astonishing. Selfishness is one thing, but the vultures are on another level.

Keep this in mind, their atrocious behavior is how they act when things in the world are good. They aren’t living in a warzone, they know where they are getting their next meal from, they have a warm place to sleep, and none of this is life or death for them, but this is how they act. Imagine how that same person would be with the slightest amount of pressure put on them. How would they act if there was real strife in the world? People wonder how I can be so harsh when it comes to assessing human nature, and it is because I see how they are when things are going well, and can extrapolate from there.

Then there are the dismissives. They are the sort that thinks they are the main character of the movie. That everything will wait until they can make time in their schedule. If there is something that they had set previously then everyone else can wait for them, but then they are shocked that isn’t how death works. It could be said that this is another version of staving off the inevitable. If they don’t confront the fact that mom is dying, then she won’t die. Denial is a hell of a drug, and people will go to great lengths to live under its high. However, that isn’t how the world works, and cold stark reality will be there waiting for them when they finally show up. They then have no choice, they have to externalize that blame. If they can’t accept that mom was dying with their presence or without it, they certainly aren’t going to accept the fact that their missing that monumental event was their own fault.

The vultures and the dismissives are very similar. They are in their own heads and only can see what it is that they want. Both are excellent examples of why cognitive empathy is so necessary to learn. It is also important in the cases of James, Drew, and Frank, but for different reasons. James needed to have cognitive empathy to be able to see where Drew was coming from and not be upset by the pressure to eat when that was the furthest thing from what he wanted. Frank needed cognitive empathy to see past his own anger, but his family needed it to understand that he was still the person that he had always been, and to still grant him the love and dignity that he deserved in his final days.

Often death is treated with the proper respect, but something about it really brings out the worst in some people. It can be very difficult to understand when you have to see it. Especially when the person who is dying is someone that you care about and cannot believe how those who profess to love that person could behave in such an ugly way. How could the person that you know and respect have such awful people in their lives? It is especially nasty when it is their own children or siblings.

Greed is a very powerful drive in humans. Even those that you think that you know can become monsters that are practically foaming at the mouth and can’t trifle with meaningless things like wills or the law. If you find yourself dealing with the death of a loved one, and you aren’t dealing with people like this, count your blessings. For those of you who have seen this, I imagine that it is a good motivator to be certain that you have a solid will, and a very reliable executor. If you don’t, you might have people that you thought loved you very much expecting you to waste the precious few breaths you have left in your body to settle who gets the car or the jewelry.

For everyone reading this, I doubt I actually need to say this, but I will anyway. When someone dies, none of their stuff belongs to you. You are not entitled to it, so don’t act like an ass. There is a process that has to be followed, so follow it. If others aren’t, get a lawyer involved and make sure that everything goes according to their wishes. It is their life that is being doled out among the survivors, so the very least those survivors could do is follow their wishes. Whatever is given if anything at all, it is a gift, not a given.