Introducing dying
Dear reader,
- PDF / 229,864 Bytes
- 33 Pages / 419.528 x 595.276 pts Page_size
- 75 Downloads / 218 Views
Introducing dying
“You know that it will happen one day. But I’d have rather liked not to see it coming. Having, like, a sudden end would’ve been better. Always said so.” Konstantin, 56, married, father, engineer, 12.10.2014 “Ah, if I think I wouldn’t have had this. That would have been sad. To get used to it, to get some last… Well, it’s sometimes crap of course… But you’re dead long enough, so I’m really enjoying that I’ve not just been knocked out without warning.” Konstantin, 56, married, father, engineer, 2.2.2015
1.1 Introduction Dear reader, it is unlikely that you have an individual choice over how your life will end. Dying seems to be something that simply happens, not something that you have to arrange. The perspectives our native culture has to offer with regard to the end of life, however, may heavily influence the ways of dying and kinds of death we are able to imagine. Cited above, Konstantin imagined at least two default ways to die: An unforeseen death, or a processual, consciously experienced dying that starts when a person is still alive. Konstantin did not mention the idea of life after death. He did not talk about being reborn, becoming an honored ancestor, or turning into a ghost. Neither did he believe in an incorporeal existence, or question the facticity
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2018 M. Menzfeld, Anthropology of Dying, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-19826-8_1
1
2
1 Introducing dying
of his terminal diagnosis. A sudden ending of life, on the one hand, or a period of dying after receiving the information that a serious disease would kill him within the next months, on the other hand, were the two options he could imagine. As he had been thrown into the latter, he experienced his last weeks as a dying person. From an anthropological point of view, we could say: That Konstantin was able to die at all is based on a culturally specific constellation of beliefs, knowledge systems, experiences, perceptions and ways of interpreting the world. How the process of dying that Konstantin, and others, went through can be shaped is the central topic of this thesis. While every human being will have to deal with the idea of leaving a rotting body behind someday, not everyone will be able to die in the same way – some persons are even unlikely to ever die.1 The two quotes above are not intended to imply that dying usually gets better the longer it lasts. It may be the case that somebody finds something worth living for while dying, or the reverse. Individual dying processes do not evolve in a foreseeable way. However, there are certain characteristics that many dying persons in Western Germany experience in their last weeks. The dying persons included in this study were usually initiated into a completely new mode of existence, into a situation that is only accessible in its full meaning by those who live in it. At the same time, the dying persons were confronted with this new situation without liminal guidance as is usually the case when a liminal situation takes place. There was no
Data Loading...
