My comments on others' blogs:
Amhara:
I really liked your last paragraph, because you said what you learned from talking with your grandmother ("Having built up emotions and guilt with no resolution can definitely cause emotional distress, and not being able to ever know how the deceased feels adds to the grief of the mysterious aspect of death")and stated how it affected you ("It is only human to feel unbalanced when you are handling unresolved hardships, but this reminds me how important it is to always express how I truely feel to people and always look for closure in different circumstances"). I also thought that this was a really good insight: "If your connection to whomever is deceased is weak (or has been weakened) it is very easy to begin to focus on yourself and how you feel about the situation, which isn't necessarily selfish." You acknowledged the fact that people don't always think about the deceased person - they will focus on themselves, and the situation they are in, and how they have to act.
Chris:
I agree with Amhara - I liked that you were honest about not having much experience with the topic. I also liked that you still had ideas about it; this part was especially perceptive: "Personally I have a fear of death because I always wonder how it would affect my mother if I died. It’s hard to face the fact that the people we have set up relationships with already in this world can go away instantly. In this sense it seems like the dead are treated terribly, once dead we burn and bury them never to be seen again. Not able to push them back in memory but able to push them physically off the earth." You got at the idea that the way we care for the dead is actually sort of cruel; we shove them away and try not to think about them. This is something I hadn't previously considered.
People's comments on my blog:
Amhara:
In response to your interview with your aunt "M", I thought it was very smart of you to connect us separating ourselves from the dead or the dying "because that would involve facing the fact that it's going to happen". This relates to a similar point the author of my book, Tom Jokinen, made about humans making the topic of death and the dead a taboo in general because it is an aspect of nature we can't control. I believe that your aunt had a good point about dying at home being a better environment for the one who is dying. One thing you can explore is how dying at home effects everyone else in the family. Another thing you could explore that you mentioned in this post is how formal funerals are more suppressed and why or why not this may be true.
Marilena (Mentor):
You said to comment on the second paragraph. I liked how you connected what M said to your previous thinking on the subject. It is true that people tend to avoid talking about death - I think that this is partially because it makes them feel so helpless. We could die at any moment, but no one ever talks about that. I agree agree that dying people are isolated from regular society, but I think that there are reasons for this, aside from the obvious fact that they might need medical care. People might want to be alone at the end of their lives, or with a few people who are close to them - they might want that privacy, instead of being out in the world with everyone else. You could go further by explaining what you think the cultural norm actually is.
Chris:
I think the most interesting part of your blog (because I think the idea of insight is to overused, why be insightful when we can be interesting). I have to agree with a lot of what your aunt "M" said in popular media it is seen as "death is scary and cold, full of ghouls, ghosts, and dread" and it is also something that has been taken and turned into something we don't learn or talk about. And I like the rest of your blog but as I type this I find out "Osama Bin Laden is dead" which I don't believe because I don't believe what these people say. However I find it interesting that everyone on Facebook even myself feel like this is something to update. The idea that your aunt talked about is very interesting and I feel like it is something that we should cover in class.
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