HW 17 - First Thoughts on the Illness & Dying Unit

I guess my first experience with illness and dying was when I was in first or second grade, and I didn't want to go to school, so I said I didn't feel well. However, both of my parents had to work (and I wasn't really sick), so I ended up going with my dad to the hospice where he was working at the time. A hospice is where people go when they know they're going to die soon, so that they have somewhere to stay at the end of their life. At some places their families can stay there too, but in the case of this place it was more like a hospital, where people just visited.

It definitely looked like a hospital, maybe a little smaller - there weren't any of those never-ending hallways that hospitals seem to have. I remember the walls were painted this pastel shade of yellow, and my dad lead me down a hallway to a room that had a sofa and a TV. He left me in there with one of the nurses because he had to go see someone, and for a while I was just in that room watching TV.

It was dark in there, except that the door out to the hallway was open, and the TV was on. There was a brown blanket on the sofa, one that looked like someone had knitted it - it seemed like one of those things that is made and then passed down to children, and their children, and their children. After a couple hours or so some of the patients staying there came in to watch TV, and a few minutes later my dad came to get me. I was glad to leave, because I had been worried someone would try to talk to me, and I wouldn't know what to say.

Later that same year one of my dad's friends was staying in a hospital, and we went to visit him a lot. One of those times me and my brother were both there, and my dad was talking to him for a long time, and he noticed that we were bored. Next time he gave my dad his credit card and told him to go buy a TV, so that we would have something to do when our dad was visiting him. A couple weeks later he died, and left us the TV.

Looking back on these experiences, this all seems kind of odd (the fact that I was there for all this) - for some reason this all reminds me of an Addams Family cartoon (I guess because those cartoons have the theme of children being involved in situations they shouldn't be). However, I still don't see illness and dying as bad things, mostly because they have to happen. People have to get sick sometimes so that their bodies can build up a resistance to different pathogens, and they have to die so that there are enough resources on the planet to support everyone - if no one ever died, we would probably all die.

Questions:

Does the availability of health care (or lack thereof) in a country affect people's attitude toward death?

How did ancient cultures/societies approach illness and death?

Why are illness and death not widely discussed (outside of the health care debate)? Just to add onto that, how come people talk about fixing the health care system all the time, but no one ever discusses what's going to happen to all the veterans of the Iraq war, many of whom probably have serious illnesses or injuries?