Identify four major characteristics of today’s world that impact family experiences with dying and grief. Discuss the specific impact they have on individual family members and families.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers may include:
a. A movement to deny the realities of death began during the eighteenth century, and by the twentieth century a lack of firsthand familiarity with death fostered an era in which death became sequestered, privatized, and invisible. Factors contributing to this lack of familiarity with death include increased life expectancy, changes in leading causes of death from communicable diseases to chronic and degenerative diseases (although there is renewed concern about increases in communicable diseases), redistribution of death from the young to old, decreased mortality rates, and increased duration of chronic illnesses. Geographic mobility and family social reorganization resulted in reduced intergenerational contact and fewer opportunities to participate in death-related experiences (Rando, 1993).
b. As a result of the development of life-extending technologies, (a) most deaths occur in health care settings rather than at home, (b) care has become dominated by efforts to delay death by all means available, (c) we question our assumptions of what constitutes life and death, and (d) families are confronted with decisions of prolonging dying or terminating life of loved ones (Doka, 2005).
c. Bombarded with its presentation via news media (Murray & Gilbert, 1997). These frequent, violent portrayals of death as unnatural contribute to desensitization, as well as personal traumatization of the bereaved.
d. Private grief coexists with the public expression of grief which is increasingly visible on social media (Walter, Hourizi, Moncur & Pitsillides, 2012). Individuals who did not personally know the deceased can go through rituals of mourning, participate in Facebook memorials, and “virtually” attend celebrity funerals through television or the Internet, without feeling the depth of pain and depression of actual grief. Viewers may confuse their emotional response with the real grief experienced by loved ones of the deceased, and since their “recovery” is quick, they may be insensitive to the amount of time required to “return to normal” when they experience real grief.
e. Adaption to loss has been hampered by lack of cultural supports that could assist families to integrate death into their ongoing life and the lack of instrumental social supports to help manage daily life disruptions in child care, housework, and finances (Walsh & McGoldrick, 1991). Often a minimum of rituals exists surrounding death, roles of the chronically ill or bereaved are not clearly defined, and geographic distance hinders completion of “unfinished business” and dealing with the loss (Shapiro, 2001).