3 ms·

It may seem counterintuitive, but I think the opposite is true. Think about it: what will people remember about you? If your death is relatively quick, the majo

It may seem counterintuitive, but I think the opposite is true. Think about it: what will people remember about you? If your death is relatively quick, the majority of their memories will be of happier times spent with you in good health. On the other hand, if you have a long, drawn-out, multi-year struggle, that will be what they remember most. I don't have the link handy, but there was a study a while back comparing hospice care to class 3 chemo (that's the really, really poisonous bad stuff). The study found that families of those who went into hospice coped better with the loss. Furthermore, almost counterintuitively, those in hospice care actually lived longer on average. Sometimes, taking stress off the body gives it just enough room to keep fighting on its own a bit longer...

dredmorbius 15y ago
This is my experience. I've lost friends to sudden deaths -- usually accidents. It's a bolt out of the blue, but it's over quickly and there's rarely much suffering. I've lost family "after a long illness" as the news reports say, and the roller-coaster of misdiagnoses, initial treatments, exploratory surgeries, continued uncertainty of diagnostic monitoring and procedures, hope for treatment advances, false hope from charlatans and quacks, relapses, remissions, and the final, inevitable, unstoppable, and increasingly debilitating decline, tears people, families, and communities to pieces. I've also seen cases where the end was known, but treatment brought, at a relatively low cost and with little dread or pain, an extra six months of a life that was happy and full of love. In that case, not so bad.