On death, again.

It is more the exception than the norm for people outside the medical environment to witness death.  I ask people in the first aid classes I teach whether they have seen dead people and often the answer is no.  No, with a shudder.  This is a normal reaction because death is a feared, inconceivable state for most. I ask this rather morbid question because I am interested in how people relate to death. People who have witnessed death are usually irrevocably changed.  It is an intensely private and personal moment that causes people to feel strangely privileged.  I know I have felt this.  This is not always the case, especially with violent death, which brands its awfulness on minds forever, but in my experience, peaceful death does evoke a sense of release, relief and closure to those watching the process.  People who have been witness to death seem more able to bear grief than those who have not. Maybe it is because they have had those final, personal moments where a farewell could be said.  It seems that the ability to say our last goodbye plays a huge role in our coping process.  Maybe it is because through the experience of seeing a death, its feared mystery is removed.  We do not know whether there is in fact suffering during the process of death.  I have seen death and dying in its many forms in my personal life and during my time on the ambulances and I do not feel that the dying suffer during their last moments of life, no matter what the cause. They may suffer before their body begins to shut down, but once that has happened, they seem to enter a state in which there is a nothingness, a comfortable free floating.  I say this because as much as we perceive difficulty from the outside, there is no sense of horror or pain from the patient that I have ever felt.  Once death has happened, the essence of the person disappears like a candle extinguished.  Beyond the veil.  A body remains.  A shell devoid of the flame of life.