Interpretation and Forwarding of "Warmth Has Passed"

The warmth of passing away is a book related to Death Education. The essence is: how to treat death scientifically and rationally and make life more quality.

Let's start with a short story. Duoduo was still in the second grade when grandma died of illness. His mother comforted him and said, don't be afraid, grandma just fell asleep. After a while, my pet mouse died, but my mother casually said that the mouse was asleep. After that, Duoduo refused to sleep, even if he was caught in bed, he refused to close his eyes and asked him why. Finally, my mother had to take Duoduo to the hospital for consultation. Duoduo said that he didn't dare to sleep, for fear that he would never wake up like grandma and pet mice.

Why tell this story? Because when children first come into contact with the topic of death, this may be the way most adults in China will take. You may say that it is cruel to let children know the truth of death too early. The problem is that not only do we not want to talk about death seriously with our children, but even adults keep the topic of death a secret.

Compared with us avoiding death, the western countries are a different scene. In Britain, children begin to receive death education from kindergarten, and in the United States and Germany, death education is also popularized from primary school. Students even take turns to play roles and simulate how to deal with scenes such as the death of their parents. In China, perhaps only some colleges and universities offer life and death courses, and death education has not attracted much attention. After investigating more than 65,438+000 bereaved people, it is found that more than 70% of them are facing problems such as insomnia and poor health, 80% of them often feel lonely because they miss their dead relatives, and one third of them reveal suicidal thoughts. At the same time, the lack of self-healing ability and the support of scientific view of death can easily lead to confusion in the face of death.

So, what is the universal death education in the west? The book "Warmth Has Passed" is a good handbook for popularizing death education.

Let's talk about why we dare not talk about death.

According to the "World Population Clock" of the US Census Bureau, there are 1.8 deaths every second in the world, with an average of more than 1.5 million deaths every day. Although death is everywhere, most people not only don't actively talk about death, but also subconsciously avoid it when they encounter the topic of death. Why is this happening? Let's look at the three reasons put forward in the book.

First of all, society is rejecting death, which is the concept of "death negation" put forward by Freud. Freud believed that people denied death in the form of forgetting. The author also points out in the book that it is everyone's instinct to deny death because of fear.

"Death denial" is manifested in all aspects of society. In the United States, for example, although the acceptance of making a will by buying insurance is quite high, it is actually a way to deny death by taking measures to deal with emergencies. For another example, exhausting medical means to delay the arrival of death is actually denying death. There are also some ways to deny death, that is, to escape and wait for the spring of cryonics. In short, all means of resisting the natural law of death can be regarded as "death negation".

Even when dealing with death, there are traces of "death denial". For example, when someone dies, someone will decorate the body of the deceased, so that it seems that the voice is still there, but it is actually diluting the existence of death. In many parts of the United States, when the dead are buried, they must wait for all their relatives and friends to leave, lest people think that death is a foregone conclusion.

People also avoid using the word "death" directly in interpersonal communication. Take China as an example, there are various euphemistic expressions, such as death, passing away, a hundred years, a hundred years even feathering and passing away. Due to the development of society and the change of life concept, there are fewer and fewer generations living together now. When birth, illness and death are transferred to hospitals and funeral homes, it is more difficult for children to really get in touch with death. Death has become a distant and vague concept for them, which also shows that denying death has become a natural trend.

Secondly, pop culture over-magnifies the fear effect of death. For example, in order to pursue scary effects, horror films generally create various death atmospheres through bizarre plots and horrible sound effects. Movies such as Death Comes, Wax Museum of Horror, Curse, and Midnight Bell mostly exaggerate the horror of death, which has a great influence all over the world. Similar popular culture constantly emphasizes the horrible meaning of death, which strengthens the negative impression of death in people's minds. Such as cemeteries, mortuaries, funeral homes, abandoned houses, etc. They are all terrible places, so it's best not to die by yourself.

This negative infiltration of death culture actually started from childhood. An example is given in the book. Among the 200 traditional nursery rhymes in America, half of them are full of horrible and bloody plots, including seven stories of cutting off limbs, four stories of slaughtering livestock, two stories of suffocation, and some stories of being swallowed, crushed, scalded and hanged.

Regarding the fear of death, 1986 gave birth to a fear management theory. This theory holds that in order to alleviate the fear of death, people have created a cultural world view, which can make people symbolically transcend death. However, popular culture is more in line with "Memetics". Pattern is a pattern of imitation, and the reason is genetic. It refers to an idea or concept that can be highly imitated and quickly spread in the cultural field and passed down from generation to generation. This one-sided amplification of the fear of death caters to human curiosity and excitement, and to a certain extent, develops a "cultural belief system that denies death".

Finally, our fear of death is also related to the way we die. It is mentioned in the book that Norbert elias, a German sociologist, wrote a book "Loneliness of the Dying" when he was over 80 years old, saying that his biggest worry about death was being isolated in the ward, tortured by various medical devices, and finally dying alone in an inhuman hospital bed. What he is afraid of is not death itself, but the bad experience before death.

According to a survey of more than 1000 people, 65% of the respondents are highly anxious about relying on others and enduring the pain before death. Professor Lei Ming, the author, also mentioned eight typical anxieties in another book about death, including attachment to others, pain in the process of death, humiliation in the process of death, possible isolation, isolation and abandonment in the process of death, departure of relatives, worry about the afterlife, end of death and physical fate. These anxieties and worries will deepen the fear of death and produce a negative avoidance attitude.

Here, we have finished talking about why people dare not talk about death. Simply put, the attitude of "death denial" adopted by society will make us deliberately ignore the existence of death; Excessive exaggeration of death in popular culture such as movies and books will deepen our fear of death; Suffering from the death process and the subsequent loss of self-esteem will also make us keep our mouths shut about death.

the second part

Next, we will talk about how to treat death scientifically and rationally from three aspects: death education, hospice care and psychological adjustment of bereaved people.

In the first aspect, let's talk about how to carry out death education. Eric Erickson, an American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst, divides people from birth to death into eight stages: infancy, infancy, playtime, school age, adolescence, early adulthood, middle adulthood and late adulthood. And these eight stages may encounter death at any time. Here, we will focus on how to carry out correct death education for children and adolescents.

In many European and American literature or film and television works, as long as death is involved, most parents will make up a beautiful lie for their children, such as going to heaven. In fact, these plots are the biggest lies, and the real death education in the west is not like this. In particular, the example we mentioned at the beginning will not appear, because children's imagination is richer than that of adults, and ambiguous statements will lead to more fear and doubt.

The purpose of western education about children's death is to be as honest and frank as possible. Neither the abstract concept of "death" nor the words of "falling asleep" and "going to another world" will confuse the facts. For example, children can understand and accept the saying that "my heart is broken and I no longer work". In this way, if a child meets a favorite person or animal and dies, he will not find it difficult to adapt. Moreover, they will clearly point out that the deceased himself is unwilling to leave and will not let the children feel abandoned. They will also observe the children's reaction at any time, encourage them to vent their sad feelings and tell them that crying is normal. After helping children clearly realize that someone has died, they will also explain what will happen next, tell them that the deceased will be sent to the funeral home, then arrange the funeral, and tell them some precautions in the funeral.

In fact, this way of treating death is to try to avoid leaving a mysterious and horrible impression in children's hearts and let them know that death is a normal thing and a part of everyone's life. The author also puts forward a small suggestion in the book, that pets can be kept at home to help children understand death. According to a survey, 28% of the first death experiences of American college students were related to pets. The life cycle of pets is generally short, and children can go through the process from birth to death, which is a good opportunity to help children learn the first lesson of death education.

Some literary works can also be used as teaching materials for death education. For example, in the classic fairy tale Charlotte's Web, Charlotte the spider will die after saving the pig. But the greatness of this book is that the story tells children that death is not the end, life goes on, and life goes on. There is also a book, The Other Side of the Sky Blue. The little boy Harry died in a car accident, but he couldn't let go of his relatives and friends and secretly returned to this world to express his apologies and love to them. This book is very warm, which will make children understand that death is not so terrible, and at the same time know how to cherish life and people around them. Death education is actually a kind of concept inheritance. Only when parents can face death correctly can children face death correctly.

Compared with childhood, teenagers are in an unstable period of life, receiving a lot of information such as violence, pornography and death, which is often full of anxiety and rebellion. It is relatively more difficult to carry out death education. According to this book, every American teenager aged 65,438+08 will see about 200,000 violent acts on TV. When they doubt their self-worth, identity and ability, it is easy to take radical actions, but they themselves become a more dangerous kind of people. According to some data, since the 1980s, violent crimes among teenagers have been on the rise, and accidents and killings are the two major factors that take away the lives of teenagers. However, during this period, their relationship with their parents is often alienated or even antagonistic.

In this case, it is very important to make a positive attempt. First of all, try to establish an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect within the family. Secondly, increase the frequency of family members discussing death, and truly convey their understanding and views on death. Finally, learn to listen and observe, respond to their emotional changes in time, and let them know that you will not interfere with their thoughts, but you can get useful help from you.

After death education, let's talk about the second aspect, how to carry out hospice care.

If death is inevitable, what should you do as a relative? Ba Jin, a famous writer, was lying in the hospital for six years before his death. Even his trachea was cut, so he had to rely on feeding tubes and ventilators to maintain his life. The great pain made Ba Jin mention euthanasia many times, and even said that longevity was a kind of torture for him. This contradiction between prolonging life and fighting for the right to die has aroused great discussions in philosophy, law, medicine and other fields as early as the 1970s, but there is still no satisfactory result.

The dignity of life and the dignity of death are inseparable. Of course, we can't exaggerate the pain caused by modern medical care indefinitely, but we also need to respect patients' own choices. The author mentioned the five stages of psychological changes before death summarized by Elisabeth Kubler ROSS, a master of life and death, in On Death and Dying: from denial and isolation, to anger, to negotiation, to depression and finally to acceptance. This violent psychological process is unbearable for most people, and professional hospice care can help them get through this stage with their relatives and finally face death calmly.

Britain is the birthplace of hospice care in the modern sense, and established a relatively sound hospice care organization at the earliest. 1967. On the other hand, the United States came from behind. 1983, "hospice care" was included in the medical insurance project. By 20 1 1, more than 5,300 hospice care institutions have been established, covering 50 states in the United States. Nearly 44.6% people died in hospice care program, and1650,000 people received hospice care. China established the first "Research Center for Hospice Care" in Tianjin on 1988. At present, there are about 200 hospice care institutions. According to statistics, there are more than 65438+ billion people in the world who need hospice care, but only 8% of them can get services because of the limitations of ideas, policies and practical conditions.

Hospice care is not to make patients passively wait for death, nor euthanasia, but to treat death as a special state of life, giving the parties dignity, comfort, sense of control and quality of life. You can try to think about it. If a person is happy all his life, but he lives a miserable life when he leaves for the last time. Can you say that he is really happy?

The book shows a list of the rights of hospice patients, the first of which is "I have the right to be treated as a living person". In this respect, medical institutions always have a therapeutic function greater than humanistic care. According to a survey of 7000 elderly people in nursing homes in the United States, the treatment these elderly people receive at the last stage of their lives is actually meaningless.

You may ask, if medical care is meaningless, how can we judge the effect of hospice care? We often say that a good beginning is a good ending, and the book gives a statement that a good ending means that patients, their families and nurses have not experienced unnecessary pain and suffering. According to the research summary, patients who die well generally have the following characteristics: they often have a sense of control and a sense of humor; Paying attention to gfd, not avoiding pain, can discuss death and things after death calmly; I am very happy in the company of my relatives, and I will express my concern with my words and deeds. A good death also shows four forms of death, namely, death in a deep sleep, painless death, peaceful and peaceful death, and rapid death.

Having said that, how does hospice care work? The book specifically mentions a palliative care, which was first proposed by Canadian surgeon Balfour Mount in 1974. It is a therapeutic method to meet the needs of patients and their families in the physical, psychological, social and spiritual fields. The first palliative day care center was established in Britain from 65438 to 0975. Its management feature is to enjoy professional nursing service, without restricting patients from going out to participate in activities and keeping in touch with others. If the patient wants to take a helicopter before he dies, the hospice institution will try its best to satisfy his wish. When ranking the "quality of death" in 40 countries, Britain has always been in the leading position, which is probably related to its earliest research in this field.

Is it all over when the dead leave? No, there are people left to clean up the mess. These people are collectively referred to as bereaved people in the book. Let's talk about the third aspect, how to make psychological adjustment to the bereaved.

True bereavement usually peaks in the second week after the death of the deceased. Generally speaking, the grief of bereaved people will go through seven stages: shock and denial, disorder, emotional instability, guilt, loss and loneliness, liberation and self-recovery. Really get out of the shadow of bereavement

Although it takes a long time to get out of sadness, the book also provides some ways to get out of the shadows quickly. For example, people who have lost their loved ones can honestly answer three questions: What have I lost? What do I have left? What are the possibilities for me? The book also collects some experiences of people who have lost their loved ones, and lists self-help guides on how to get out of pain, which are divided into asking for help, venting and acting.

Let's talk about how to ask for help. You can chat with friends regularly, take a walk together, or join a group counseling institution with similar experiences. So, how do you vent your emotions? Cry if you want, and laugh happily. You can yell or throw things. The last key is to keep yourself busy, such as finishing a small thing as planned every day, planning some special holiday activities in advance, or raising a pet or planting flowers and plants to express your feelings.

At this point, we have completed the scientific attitude towards death in different stages, such as death education, hospice care and psychological adjustment of bereaved people. We should learn to regard death as a part of life, and start death education from children and teenagers. When the treatment is meaningless, it is better to choose hospice care and enjoy the quality of life instead of painfully prolonging the time. The bereaved should get out of the pain as soon as possible and start a new social life through interpersonal communication, emotional counseling and distraction.

the third part

Writer Shi Tiesheng said that he once said this sentence. He said, "Death is something that you don't have to rush for success. It is a festival that will come eventually." Indeed, people will die. Since you will die, let's talk about how to "live to the old age and live in the present".

First of all, from now on, focus on self-realization and minimize regrets in life.

The philosopher Montaigne said that thinking about death in advance is equal to planning freedom in advance. The book mentions a survey that when death approaches, the fear of death among the elderly is related to self-satisfaction. In other words, when a person thinks that he has achieved his goal in life and his quality of life is relatively high, he will be more likely to accept the coming death.

An example is given in the book. Margaret mead, known as "the most popular anthropologist in the world", devoted his life to spreading public culture and traditional knowledge in developing countries. After his death, he was awarded the title of the highest honorary citizen by the President of the United States. She was interviewed on public television a few months before her death, and she was not afraid to talk about her impending death. At the end of the program, she stood up and walked slowly into the shadow of the stage. At the moment when she was about to disappear into the darkness, she waved a cane and showed a touching smile on her face. This calmness and elegance became her last impression in the hearts of the world.

Do you want to leave this world with the last good memories like her? Irvin Yalom is a master of psychotherapy. He has been in close contact with some cancer patients for ten years. His deepest feeling about death is, "You don't live according to your own ideas, you don't live according to your own vision, and your anxiety about death will grow bigger and bigger before you die."

So how do you figure out what you want to do most in your life and what you care about most? I suggest you try a little trick mentioned in the book-write yourself an obituary, that is, a notice of death. You can try to think about what you want others to say about you when you die. What do you want to do for the person you love the most? What do you want to leave in this world?

So, is it useful to write obituaries? I got a book "The Art of Asking Questions" in the APP. Andrew Suo Beier, the author of this book, studied medicine in college. Once he happened to listen to a class, the content is to let the listener write an obituary for himself. It was this little experience that made Suo Beier find the life he really wanted. Today, Suo Beier has become a famous American business strategist, super consultant and best-selling author in the field of customer relations.

Secondly, strive to improve mental maturity and be a person who is not afraid of old age.

In a young culture, aging seems to be a kind of failure and pain. However, ram dass, a famous American spiritual teacher, wrote a book "Learn to Be an Old Man", telling us that the greatest advantage of getting old is that we don't care what others think of us. In other words, when you are old, it is easier for you to put aside secular views and live according to your own ideas. That's true. According to a survey released by the National Center for Public Opinion Research, as many as 66% of the elderly over 70 are optimistic about their aging.

Tuesdays with morrie is a phenomenal bestseller with a sales volume of over 6.5438+million copies, and it is also an autobiographical documentary novel, which also embodies similar views. Murray, a professor of social psychology, teaches the writer mitch albom his thoughts and understanding of life every Tuesday. He said: "when I should be a child, I am happy to be a child;" When I should be a smart old man, I am also happy to be a smart old man. I am willing to accept all the power that nature has given me. " It can be seen that getting old actually represents the maturity of thought and wisdom. Psychologist jung also believes that people who truly understand the meaning of life will be more personalized. Not afraid of getting old, accepting getting old means that we can take over from the outside and become the real masters of our own world.

Finally, accept the existence of death as a part of the quality of life.

The British Economist Intelligence Unit published the 20 15 Death Quality Index, and China ranked 7 1 among the 80 countries listed in the report, indicating that the hospice care service in China is still in a rather backward position. Correspondingly, according to the calculation of an old doctor who has been practicing medicine for decades, 70% of China people's lifetime medical expenses are spent in the last three months, and 70% of them are spent in the last 28 days. Many patients who don't need to go bankrupt for treatment, doctors and their families are bound by the moral concept that "going bankrupt is a crime", which leads to the pain of many patients in their lives is not as good as the last few months in hospital beds.

? In fact, death itself is meaningless, but people's avoidance, resistance and fear give it more negative significance. The ancients were full of advanced cognition about this. For example, more than two thousand years ago, Zhuangzi asked his disciples to abandon their bodies in the wilderness for crows, eagles, mice and ants to enjoy. This calm attitude towards death is also reflected in a psychologist who spreads behavior correction. Before he died, he said with a smile, I always knew I would die. Song Meiling, who lived 100 years old, expressed this feeling: Why did God treat me so badly but let me continue to live? I don't know anyone anymore. This just shows that if there is no death, the life experience is likely to get worse and worse.

China has entered an aging society since 2000. It is estimated that by 2025, the population over 60 will reach 300 million, becoming a super-old country, which indicates that a huge tide of old age and death is coming. California passed the natural death act in 1976, allowing patients to prolong the death process according to their own wishes without using life support system. However, living wills are not popular in China. In most cases, family members make decisions related to surgery, treatment and life. In fact, accepting death is not so terrible, but it helps to plan your life in advance. Elisabeth Kubler ROSS is a master of life and death. He thinks that death is the key to open the door of life. By accepting the limitations of our individual existence, we can gain strength and courage and inspire all our potential. It should be said that having the great wisdom of "from birth to death" will be the greatest guarantee for a happy life.

abstract

First, we discussed why we are afraid to talk about death. The attitude of "death denial" adopted by the society will make us deliberately ignore the existence of death, while the excessive exaggeration of death in popular cultures such as movies and books will deepen our fear of death, and the torture suffered in the process of death and the resulting loss of self-esteem will also make us remain silent about death.

Secondly, we talked about what is the scientific attitude towards death. Learn to treat death as a part of life, and it is best to carry out death education from an early age; When the treatment is meaningless, it is best to choose hospice care and enjoy the quality of life instead of painfully prolonging the time; Bereaved people can get out of grief and start a new social life as soon as possible through interpersonal communication, emotional counseling and distraction.

Finally, it summarizes how to "live to the old age and live in the present". When we live a quality life, when death approaches, we will not be full of regrets; When we don't resist getting old psychologically, we can experience real freedom; When we accept the existence of death, we can enjoy the present more calmly and become a self-controlled and powerful person.