Death becomes us!

In lieu of Phil's post on dying the other day, i can't help but post this article i read in a local paper here.

YOU remember that old saying about being run over by a bus? Apparently, it hardly ever happens."The idea that you might step out the door one morning and not make it back, that's not likely," says David Currow, an expert in matters of life, death and the space in between.
"Most people - most Australians, anyway - only die at the end of a very long life."
Most Australians will also know when - or, at least, roughly when - death is coming to claim them.
"Death won't surprise most of us," says Currow, the head of the department of palliative care at Flinders University in Adelaide. "People will get diagnosed with an illness, like cancer or heart disease, and they will be told that they can expect the disease to progress. So most people will know, often a year or more in advance, that death is coming."

i am so looking forward to knowing more than a year in advance i'm going to keel over.....can't i just go with a "BANG"????

Most means about 80 per cent, according to figures presented at the eighth annual palliative care conference in Sydney last month.
Currow says people can use that time of advance warning to make decisions about how they'd like their death to be managed. For some, that involves making a decision about where they want to die. "If you ask most people that question, they'll say: 'At home'," he says.
In reality, about four out of five Australians will die not at home but in some kind of institution, such as a hospital, hospice or aged-care facility.
"That's part of the same phenomenon," Currow says. "It's a product of the fact that we live long lives and death doesn't come suddenly. Our health deteriorates, we end up in hospital, and there we die."
Given that most Australians will be well aware of where, when and how they will die, it's surprising how few make plans for it.
"They make wills, or they make amends with people, but when it comes to actually deciding how they want doctors to manage the end of their lives, they just don't talk about it," says Bill Silvester, a doctor at Melbourne's Austin Hospital.
"I can't tell you the number of times that a patient who is suffering from a disease, like cancer or heart disease, comes into the intensive care ward, having slipped into a coma, and the family can't tell us what to do," Silvester says.
"It might be somebody who has known that death is coming, but they haven't talked to their family about what should happen, when they are no longer in a position to make decisions for themselves."
In the absence of any other instructions, emergency ward doctors often rush to save the dying patient by inserting a feeding tube or putting them on a respirator.
The result, of course, in these modern times, is that technology and medicines are applied. The patient is saved and then must live for months or years, unable to move, speak or feed themselves.
"We hook them up to machines and many times, the family will then say: 'Dad wouldn't have wanted this. He wouldn't have wanted to be kept alive by machines'," Silvester says.
"It can be extremely traumatic. I've seen arguments between family members and I've seen the pain they have to go through, as they try to decide what to do next."
Evidence for that can be found in hospices and aged-care facilities across the nation, where many thousands of patients are being kept alive, in circumstances that are probably cruel, in part because nobody in the family is prepared to make a decision that would hasten their death.
"The tragedy is, many of those patients had time to talk to their families about what they wanted to happen," Silvester says.
"But they didn't. For some reason, people just assume their loved ones know what they want but when it comes down to it, they don't."
As an experiment, Silvester says people should turn to their partner or children one day soon, and ask them: "Do you have any idea how I feel about hospitals, about medical care, about artificial life support?
"Ask them: 'If I had a stroke and I was losing the ability to speak, to feed myself, to move, how would I want to be treated? Would I want the doctors to revive me, to put in breathing tubes, feeding tubes, or just to let me go?"'
Silvester says most people will be surprised. "Their families won't know," he says.
In part, that's because death is barely discussed in most households, since it never pays a visit there. Women no longer often die in the front room while giving birth; children don't get carried off by illness; and diseases such as cancer are often treatable.
"But in the past five years, one in three Australians has cared for somebody who was facing an expected death," Currow says. "That's an incredible number, but it shows what we are facing in an ageing society. These are issues we must deal with."
Silvester acknowledges that it can be difficult to talk about death, but it's worse for families to have to make decisions that effectively end the lives of people they love.
"So think of it as a conversation about your life," Silvester says. "Talk to your family about your values and explain to them the circumstances under which you'd like to go, because they are things your family really ought to know about you."

till next time, Michelle.