What It Feels Like to Die

Science is just beginning to understand the experience of life’s end.

By Jennie Dear

“Do you want to know what will happen as your body starts shutting down?”

My mother and I sat across from the hospice nurse in my parents’ Colorado home. It was 2005, and my mother had reached the end of treatments for metastatic breast cancer. A month or two earlier, she’d been able to take the dog for daily walks in the mountains and travel to Australia with my father. Now, she was weak, exhausted from the disease and chemotherapy and pain medication.

My mother had been the one to decide, with her doctor’s blessing, to stop pursuing the dwindling chemo options, and she had been the one to ask her doctor to call hospice. Still,  we weren’t prepared for the nurse’s question. My mother and I exchanged glances, a little shocked. But what we felt most was a sense of relief.

During six-and-a-half years of treatment, although my mother saw two general practitioners, six oncologists, a cardiologist, several radiation technicians, nurses at two chemotherapy facilities, and surgeons at three different clinics—not once, to my knowledge, had anyone talked to her about what would happen as she died.

There’s good reason. “Roughly from the last two weeks until the last breath, somewhere in that interval, people become too sick, or too drowsy, or too unconscious, to tell us what they’re experiencing,” says Margaret Campbell, a professor of nursing at Wayne State University who has worked in palliative care for decades. The way death is talked about tends to be based on what family, friends, and medical professionals see, rather than accounts of what dying actually feels like.

James Hallenbeck, a palliative-care specialist at Stanford University, often compares dying to black holes. “We can see the effect of black holes, but it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to look inside them. They exert an increasingly strong gravitational pull the closer one gets to them. As one passes the ‘event horizon,’ apparently the laws of physics begin to change.”

What does dying feel like? Despite a growing body of research about death, the actual, physical experience of dying—the last few days or moments—remains shrouded in mystery. Medicine is just beginning to peek beyond the horizon.

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Until about 100 years ago, almost all dying happened quickly. But modern medicine has radically changed how long the end of life can be stretched. Now, Americans who have access to medical care often die gradually, of lingering diseases like most terminal cancers or complications from diabetes or dementia, rather than quickly from, say, a farm accident or the flu. According to the Centers for Disease Control’s most recent figures, Americans are most likely to die of heart disease, cancer, or chronic pulmonary lung disease.

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For those who do die gradually, there’s often a final, rapid slide that happens in roughly the last few days of life—a phase known as “active dying.” During this time, Hallenbeck writes in Palliative Care Perspectives, his guide to palliative care for physicians, people tend to lose their senses and desires in a certain order. “First hunger and then thirst are lost. Speech is lost next, followed by vision. The last senses to go are usually hearing and touch.”

Whether dying is physically painful, or how painful it is, appears to vary. “There are some kinds of conditions where pain is inevitable,” Campbell says. “There are some patients that just get really, really old and just fade away, and there’s no distress.” Having a disease associated with pain doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily endure a difficult death, either. Most people dying of cancer need pain medication to keep them comfortable, Campbell notes—and the medicine usually works. “If they’re getting a good, comprehensive pain regimen, they can die peacefully,” she says.

When people become too weak to cough or swallow, some start to make a noise in the backs of their throats. The sound can be deeply disturbing, as if the patient is suffering. But that’s not what it feels like to the person dying, as far as doctors can tell. In fact, medical researchers believe that the phenomenon—which is commonly called a death rattleprobably doesn’t hurt.

Ultimately, because most people lose awareness or consciousness in their last few hours or days, it’s hard to know for certain how much patients are suffering. “We generally believe that if your brain is really in a comatose kind of situation, or you’re not really responsive, that your perception—how you feel about things—may also be significantly decreased,” says David Hui, an oncologist and palliative-care specialist who researches the signs of approaching death.  “You may or may not even be aware of what’s happening.”

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A week or two after we spoke to the nurse, my mother sank into a state where she was rarely conscious. When she was awake, it was only the most basic part of her that was there: the part that told her legs to move to get her to the bathroom, the automated steps in brushing her teeth and then wiping the sink afterward. Her mind turned away from her children and husband for the first time.

I wanted to know what she was thinking about. I wanted to know where her mind was. Being at the bedside of an unresponsive dying person can feel like trying to find out whether someone is home by looking through thick-curtained windows. Is the person sleeping, dreaming, experiencing something supernatural? Is her mind gone?

For many dying people, “the brain does the same thing that the body does in that it starts to sacrifice areas which are less critical to survival,” says David Hovda, director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center. He compares the breakdown to what happens in aging: People tend to lose their abilities for complex or executive planning, learning motor skills—and, in what turns out to be a very important function, inhibition.

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“As the brain begins to change and start to die, different parts become excited, and one of the parts that becomes excited is the visual system,” Hovda explains. “And so that’s where people begin to see light.”

Recent research points to evidence that the sharpening of the senses some people report also seems to match what we know about the brain’s response to dying. Jimo Borjigin, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, first became intrigued by this subject when she noticed something strange in the brains of animals in another experiment: Just before the animals died, neurochemicals in the brain suddenly surged. While scientists had known that brain neurons continued to fire after a person died, this was different. The neurons were secreting new chemicals, and in large amounts.

“A lot of cardiac-arrest survivors describe that during their unconscious period, they have this amazing experience in their brain,” she says. “They see lights and then they describe the experience as ‘realer than real.’” She realized the sudden release of neurochemicals might help to explain this feeling.

Borjigin and her research team tried an experiment. They anesthetized eight rats, and then stopped their hearts. “Suddenly, all the different regions of the brain became synchronized,” she says. The rats’ brains showed higher power in different frequency waves, and also what is known as coherence—the electrical activity from different parts of the brain working together.

“If you’re focusing attention, doing something, trying to figure out a word or trying to remember a face—when you’re doing high-level cognitive activity, these features go up,” Borjigin says. “These are well-used parameters in studying human consciousness in awake humans.  So, we thought, if you’re alert or aroused, similar parameters should also go up in the dying brain. In fact, that was the case.”

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In her last couple of weeks, when my mother’s mind seemed to be floating off somewhere else most of the time, she would sometimes lift her arms into the air, plucking at invisible objects with her fingers. Once, I captured her hands in mine and asked what she’d been doing. “Putting things away,” she answered, smiling dreamily.

This half-dreaming, half-waking state is common in dying people. In fact, researchers led by Christopher Kerr at a hospice center outside Buffalo, New York, conducted a study of dying people’s dreams. Most of the patients interviewed, 88 percent, had at least one dream or vision. And those dreams usually felt different to them from normal dreams. For one thing, the dreams seemed clearer, more real. The “patients’ pre-death dreams were frequently so intense that the dream carried into wakefulness and the dying often experienced them as waking reality,” the researchers write in the Journal of Palliative Medicine.

Seventy-two percent of the patients dreamed about reuniting with people who had already died. Fifty-nine percent said they dreamed about getting ready to travel somewhere. Twenty-eight percent dreamed about meaningful experiences in the past. (Patients were interviewed every day, so the same people often reported dreams about multiple subjects.)

For most of the patients, the dreams were comforting and positive. The researchers say the dreams often helped decrease the fear of death. “The predominant quality of pre-death dreams/visions was a sense of personal meaning, which frequently carried emotional significance for the patient,” they report.

In patients’ final hours, after they’ve stopped eating and drinking, after they’ve lost their vision, “most dying people then close their eyes and appear to be asleep,” says Hallenbeck, the Stanford palliative-care specialist. “From this point on … we can only infer what is actually happening. My impression is that this is not a coma, a state of unconsciousness, as many families and clinicians think, but something like a dream state.”

The exact moment at which this happens—when a person enters a dream state, or even when a person starts dying—is hard to pinpoint.

That was true in my mother’s case. In the early hours one morning after it snowed, I was keeping watch with two of my mother’s friends in her library, the room where we’d moved her to accommodate a hospital bed. She seemed peaceful, and in the dim light of the morning, we stood at different points around the bed, listening to her raspy breathing.

She made no dramatic moves or indications that she was about to leave us. She didn’t open her eyes or sit up suddenly. She took a last, slightly louder breath, and died.

“It’s like a storm coming in,” Hallenbeck says. “The waves started coming up. But you can never say, well, when did the waves start coming up? … The waves get higher and higher, and eventually, they carry the person out to sea.”

Complete Article HERE!

Early Palliative Care Improves Patients’ Quality of Life

Also increases chances of having end-of-life discussions, study shows

By Robert Preidt

The key to helping our patients die with dignity is improving the palliative care we provide, writes Priya Sayal.

Starting palliative care shortly after a person is diagnosed with incurable cancer helps patients cope and improves their quality of life, a new study shows.

It also leads to more discussions about patients’ end-of-life care preferences, the researchers added.

Palliative care, also called comfort care, is given to improve the quality of life for patients who have a life-threatening disease or terminal illness, such as cancer. The goal is not to cure the patient, but to manage the symptoms of the disease, according to the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

The new study included 350 people recently diagnosed with incurable lung or gastrointestinal cancer. They were randomly assigned to one of two care groups. One group received early palliative care integrated with cancer care. The other received cancer care alone.

The patients were evaluated at 12 and 24 weeks after diagnosis. At 24 weeks, the early palliative care patients were much more likely to report using active and engaged coping styles than the standard cancer care patients.

Early palliative care patients also had much higher quality of life and lower levels of depression at 24 weeks, but not at 12 weeks, the study found.

Thirty percent of early palliative care patients said they had discussed end-of-life care preferences. Just 14 percent of standard care patients had similar talks.

The study was presented recently at an American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in San Francisco. Findings presented at meetings are generally viewed as preliminary until they’ve been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

“What we found was the patients who received early palliative care were more likely to use adaptive coping strategies — meaning they were more likely to take some action to make their lives better as well as to accept their diagnosis,” lead author Joseph Andrew Greer said in an ASCO news release.

“Palliative care is a key ingredient to improving a quality of life, which is important to both patients and their families,” said Greer. He’s clinical director of psychology and a research scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

ASCO spokesman Dr. Andrew Epstein said these findings help show the benefits of integrating palliative care into cancer care.

“A diagnosis of cancer is never easy for patients, so it is promising that we now have a strategy of early palliative care that can help patients cope while improving their quality of life,” Epstein said.

More information

The Center to Advance Palliative Care has more on palliative care.

Complete Article HERE!

Designer Thinks About Death Every Hour: Why Do We Dwell on Dying?

By Ashley P. Taylor,

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Fashion-designer-turned-director Tom Ford said he thinks a lot about death. “Death is all I think about. There is not a day or really an hour that goes by that I don’t think about death,” he recently told Hollywood Reporter.

Many people probably share Ford’s morbid tendencies, at least to some extent, Pelin Kesebir, an assistant scientist and psychologist at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Live Science.

“To be preoccupied with death is very common and very natural,” Kesebir said. This preoccupation can cause psychological problems, but it doesn’t always do so, she said.

It’s rare that people have a pathological fear of death, she said. Further, although “thoughts of death can be a source of anxiety and dread for someone,” they can instead be “a source of immense clarity and wisdom for others,” she said. [10 Things That Make Humans Special]

However, psychologists in one school of thought — those who are “existentially oriented,” or who study the way that concerns about the meaning and value of existence affect human behavior— say that the roots of many common psychological problems can be traced back to people’s anxiety about death, Kesebir said. More specifically, these problems relate to anxiety about failing to live a good life, Kesebir said.

“People are usually not afraid of death per se, but of not having lived a worthwhile life,” she said.

People may have frequent thoughts about death because of humans’ sophisticated mental abilities, she said. Our minds “make us painfully aware of inevitable mortality, and this awareness clashes with our biologically wired desire for life,” she said.

The result of this clash is a very understandable and normal anxiety, Kesebir said.

If people are bothered by thoughts of death, Kesebir suggested engaging in thought experiments about what it would be like to live forever and the problems immortality could bring. She noted that although such thought experiments can leave people intellectually convinced that death is actually a good and necessary thing, it may be difficult to feel that way, emotionally.

The best way “to accept death gracefully is living a good life — a life that is true to your values,” she said. People who do this may stave off a fear of not having lived well.

It’s also possible that a preoccupation with death can actually lead to a relief from anxiety about that final event, she said. Some people who have had near-death experiences “report an increased appreciation and zest for life, closer, more meaningful interpersonal relationships, an increased belief in themselves, changed priorities,” and other positive changes in their lives and outlooks, she said. [After Death: 8 Burial Alternatives That Are Going Mainstream]

In other words, after brushes with death, some people tend to live better approximations of what they consider to be good lives, which can in turn can relieve anxiety about death.

So according to Kesebir, thoughts of death, like Tom Ford’s, are normal and might even help people to live better.

Complete Article HERE!

Musings on Mortality: Difference between suicide, medical aid in dying

By Deborah Alecson

There is a profound difference between suicide and medical aid in dying, otherwise known as death with dignity. It is not a matter of semantics.

Death with Dignity Campaign

In a death-phobic culture such as ours, one in which we prevent ourselves from projecting into our dying time, we cannot grasp the distinction. True, both result in the taking of one’s own life, but one is an act of desperation and self-destruction, while the other is an act of self-love. How can choosing death over life be motivated by self-love, you are wondering. We will explore this later in the column.

People commit suicide often in the prime of their lives because living for them is unbearable. Unlike the terminally ill who choose medical aid in dying, people who seek to commit suicide are not in their dying time but in their living time. More often than not, there are underlying and unresolvable emotional and psychological torments. There is depression or a psychiatric illness that has not been or cannot be treated. For the elderly, suicide can be motivated by the suffering that comes from living a compromised life without the support of family, friends, or community. Loneliness and feelings of abandonment are factors in suicide, especially for the elderly.

Suicide is considered a failure of the person and of our society. Help was needed and not found. In our culture, suicide is to be prevented at all costs including the involuntary psychiatric hospitalization (or incarceration depending on how you view that which is “involuntary”) of the person who discloses his or her suicidal thoughts. There are consequences for a patient in therapy to even talk about suicide: The therapist must report him or her to the authorities. The horrible irony is that the one place a suicidal person can get help to understand his or her own feelings, with a therapist, is the one place where he or she can’t talk about these feelings.

In a death-phobic culture, thoughts of suicide are considered aberrant. But let’s be honest, who hasn’t thought about suicide at least once in their life?

The will to live is an instinct of such force that human beings kill other human beings to stay alive. Human beings accept life-prolonging treatments during what would be their natural dying time that in the end, diminish the quality of time that they had bought with more treatment. People will do unbelievable things to ensure their own survival.

So, choosing to die under the weight of the instinctual and societal will to live is either accomplished out of sheer terror of life itself or incredible courage. Courage to venture into the unknown.

Since most of us have not been around dying people and as I wrote earlier, rarely imagine ourselves in that situation, we have no idea what dying is like. We don’t understand what it asks of us and what it takes out of us. While hospice care can be a possibility for how we live our dying time, it is not for everyone.

Medical aid in dying is now possible in five states. This means that people who are dying of a terminal illness can request a lethal dose of medication to end their own lives. Those few terminally ill patients who request and qualify for medical aid in dying do so to have a dignified death on their own terms. That’s all. This choice is a logical, sound, and deeply compassionate act of relief, not a desperate escape of a circumstantial situation as suicide often can be.

How can choosing death over life be motivated by self-love? When your dying time comes, you may want to spare yourself and your loved ones a prolonged and brutal decline. This to me is self-love. It is not suicide.

Complete Article HERE!

What happens when you die?

EVER wondered what happens after we die? Here’s everything you need to know, from what happens to our bodies to if there’s life after death.

By Reiss Smith

Scientists have worked out how our bodies decompose after we die
Scientists have worked out how our bodies decompose after we die

What happens to your body after you die?

Medically speaking, death happens in two stages. The first, clinical death, lasts for four to six minutes from the moment a person stops breathing and the heart stops pumping blood.

During this stage, organs remain alive and there may be enough oxygen in the brain that no permanent damage occurs.

The second stage of dying, biological death, is the process by which the body’s organs shut down and cells begin to degenerate.

Doctors are often able to halt this process by cooling the body below its normal temperature, allowing them to revive patients before brain damage sets in.After 12 hours, skin loses its colour and blood pools at the lowest point of the body, causing red and purple bruising.

Before this, rigor mortis sets in, making the body stiff and rigid. This is caused by calcium leaking into the muscle cells, which binds to protein and causes them to contract.

Unless the body is embalmed, it will start decomposing as soon as blood stops flowing.

A process called putrefaction happens after bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract eats through the abdominal organs, releasing horrid smells which attract insects.

Maggots laid by blowflies eat the rotting body tissue and can consume 60 per cent of the body’s tissue in a few weeks.

The remaining parts are then eaten by plants, insects and animals, which can take a year or more depending on how the body has been buried.

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What happens to thoughts after you die?

Scientists have conducted much research into what happens to consciousness after death.

Reddit user r00tdude wrote: “It was just black emptiness. No thoughts, no consciousness, nothing.

Is there life after death? What do Christians, Muslims and other religions believe?

Without any scientific evidence of an afterlife, many religions offer their own explanation as to what happens after death.

Christians believe that after dying, spirits are sent to heaven or hell depending on their Earthly behaviour.

Depending on which strand of the religion you ask, sinners are sent to hell either for eternity or until they have repented their actions. Those who have lived their lives according to Christian principles will be sent to heaven.

Catholics believe in the idea of purgatory, a place between heaven and hell where sinners first go to repent for their wrong-doings.

Bodies decompose quickly unless they are embalmed
Bodies decompose quickly unless they are embalmed
The Islamic faith teaches that Allah will raise the dead on “The Last Day” – a date known only to him. On this day, he will judge all souls and send them to either paradise or hell.

Muslims believe that until then, the dead remain in their graves, where they will be sent visions of their fate.

According to Buddhists, spirits are reincarnated into new bodies until they achieve enlightenment. Upon doing so, they will exit the mortal coil and reach Nirvana – an “incomprehensible, indescribable, inconceivable and unutterable” place.

Many religions believe in the idea of an afterlife
Many religions believe in the idea of an afterlife
Unlike most religions, the concept of an afterlife isn’t central to Judaism, instead it focuses on actions made in life.

There are some mentions of an afterlife in the religion, but not one divided into heaven and hell.

The Torah talks of an afterlife called Sheol – a shadowy place down in the centre of the Earth, where all souls go to without judgement.

Complete Article HERE!

How dementia makes it harder to offer end-of-life comfort

Pauline Finster, who barely speaks anymore, is receiving hospice care at an assisted-living facility. Meanwhile, gangrene is spreading across her right foot.
Pauline Finster, who barely speaks anymore, is receiving hospice care at an assisted-living facility. Meanwhile, gangrene is spreading across her right foot.

By Rachel Bluth

Dementia took over Pauline Finster’s 91-year-old mind long ago, and she may die without having another real conversation with her daughter.

After Finster broke her hip in July 2015, Jackie Mantua noticed her mother’s speech ebbing until she said only “hi” or that she felt fine. Mantua last heard Finster speak six months ago.

Finster’s hip surgery led to a series of medical interventions that left her with poor circulation in her legs. Then gangrene set in. Mantua won’t look at her mother’s right foot, where the dead tissue is creeping from the toes to the heel.

She has instructed the staff at the AlfredHouse assisted-living facility in Rockville, Md., where her mother has been in hospice care since earlier this summer, to keep Finster on Tylenol to curb the gangrene’s discomfort.

Is that enough? It’s really all she can do at this point, Mantua said.

Finster began hospice care at the beginning of the summer. Pictures of her and her husband as a young woman are the last reminders in her room of her life before dementia.
Finster began hospice care at the beginning of the summer. Pictures of her and her husband as a young woman are the last reminders in her room of her life before dementia.

Hospice’s purpose is to ease a dying patient’s pain at the end of life and improve the quality of that life. But what’s to be done when a dementia patient in her waning days can’t communicate about her pain or help identify the cause? Or when that patient resists taking medications?

All those concerns can be troubling for relatives caring for loved ones with dementia and in hospice care, according to a recent study in the American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease & Other Dementias.

Families often describe a cancer patient’s last months as stressful but meaningful. That isn’t the case with dementia patients because the disease changes the patient’s personality and causes behavior issues, according to George Demiris, one of the study’s authors and a professor of biobehavioral nursing and health systems at the University of Washington’s School of Nursing in Seattle.

Caregivers who took part in the study said they worried that their loved ones were in pain but were unable to properly express it — and that possibility disturbed them, according to interviews with families taking care of dementia patients in their last stage of life.

Multiple participants described feeling frustrated and defeated by patients’ cognitive difficulties and changing emotions, the study reported. Some described the patients as “prisoners” inside their bodies.

Helping a dementia patient in pain can be challenging for hospice workers, too.

Previous research found that patients with dementia were prescribed lower doses of opioids than patients with cancer with similar pain scores.

Other research has found that hospice nurses frequently asked relatives to interpret patients’ “pain signals.” For example, one caregiver knew her mother was in pain when she moved a certain way in her chair. Another recognized that his wife was in pain by observing how she squeezed the hand of a home health-care aide while being given a bath.

Sometimes, patients gasp for air or repeatedly touch the same part of their bodies.

Mantua said she watches her mother’s face and stays vigilant for winces or grimaces. Her face is still expressive, Mantua said. Still, there are no words, only moans to indicate something is wrong.

Recently, Mantua said her mother has been acting “strange.” Instead of her usual vacant but happy smile, Finster looked at her daughter with a “horrified” expression. Mantua told the hospice chaplain that it looked as though her mother had seen the devil.

The cause?

“You have no idea, because she can’t say anything,” Mantua said. “I was saying, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ and she’s just looking at me like crazy.”

Finster has had dementia for 10 years. She has spent most of that time in facilities, moving from independent living to assisted living to memory care.

Mantua has felt some of the frustration that other caregivers of patients with dementia experience. Three or four years ago, when Finster still had a phone in her room, she sometimes called her son Les, Mantua’s older brother, 10 times to leave him the same message — that people were coming into her room and stealing her food. She simply forgot that she had called before.

Finster’s years of cognitive decline have taken a toll on Mantua and her family.

“You get to the point you want them to die because it’s hard,” Mantua said. “It’s hard to deal with. It’s a very helpless feeling.”

Now 53, Mantua is the mother of three adult children and the grandmother of twin 5-year-old boys. She said she doesn’t have the patience or natural caretaking abilities to tend to her mother full time.

It comforts her to know that her mother is looked after by a trained staff 24 hours a day, but for families who find themselves as the primary caregivers for dying dementia patients, the job can lead to anxiety, depression and grief, according to the recent study that Demiris helped write.

“Caregivers stated that patients were combative because they could not understand that interventions were meant to help them, or that they forgot about past pain and so rejected attempts at assessment and treatment,” the study said.

For families, a loved one with dementia can become like a stranger who grows angrier and more aggressive than the person they remembered, Demiris said, which “complicates the caregiving experience.”

Finster isn’t aggressive anymore. Mantua remembers when the dementia made her mother paranoid and angry. She was once so combative, the staff at her former assisted-living facility wouldn’t try to feed her unless Mantua or her brother were present.

The decision to begin hospice care wasn’t easy for Mantua or her family. She said it feels as if her mother is already gone.

There isn’t much for Mantua to do when she visits her mother. She chatters as Finster dozes, cradling a baby doll that is always with her. A staff member regularly changes the doll’s clothes, which amuses Mantua.

For now, she keeps driving an hour once every other week from her home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to Finster’s room in Rockville, where they wait for the end together.

Complete Article HERE!

Maybe We Don’t Need To Fear Death At All

By Rebecca Sambursky

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We all joke about dying one day, but when someone we love passes on it no longer becomes the punch line to a vulgar joke—instead the thought of death becomes a subtle pain that lingers within our heart for the rest of our lives.

Death is a scary concept. Not knowing if the next breath is our last, and if and when we will have enough time to say our goodbyes—that’s frightening.

Death has taken some of the most important people in my life too soon, but maybe death is not something to fear. Maybe death is a beautiful beginning; a fresh start where the people we cherish feel no pain and watch over us as we continue to live our everyday lives.

I am not saying that death is something to feel joyful about—it is okay to feel dejected; it’s okay to cry and mourn the loss of someone you loved. What I am saying is that maybe we are overlooking the positive aspect that stems from such a heart-rending event.

When someone is taken from us suddenly, we find ourselves stuck in a place of confusion and despair because life without them doesn’t seem plausible. I can’t help but think of one of the most common phrases that I’ve heard over and over again–“It is a shame, he or she was taken way too soon.” I found myself consumed with that phrase and was constantly questioning why some people died so young, why some people would suffer for years before passing, or why some people were blessed with a long healthy lifespan.

But maybe death is like a tragic love story—the outcome results in death, but the journey is trotted fearlessly by people who are adventurous and driven by the idea of living a full life despite their questionable duration on this Earth.

We spend so much time fearing death, when we really should fear not living.

Like Shakespeare said, everyone owes God one good death. We were put here with a purpose and with no indication of how long we will have. So why are we avoiding living our lives to the greatest extent when death is inevitable? Why are we so afraid to take that next step that can potentially alter the rest of our lives?

The truth of the matter is, death does not discriminate—it doesn’t matter what race you are, your gender, what your income is, or whether you are young or old. It doesn’t factor in whether you are compassionate, malicious, timid, or loud. It is because of this that death should not be dreaded, but should be the reason we live the life we have been given exactly the way we want to.

Maybe death exists so we realize just how precious our time is—death should not be viewed as this dark morbid being, but as a mysterious presence that pushes us to do the things that frighten us the most.

We don’t know when we will say our final words. We don’t know what we are going to be feeling the moment that life is taken away from us. So what has the death of my loved ones done to me? It has fueled me to take every opportunity that is put in front of me, and experience every moment like it is my last. So Death—the motivation to live a full life daringly before it brings you to your new beginning.

Complete Article HERE!