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Fear of violent death
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Death: a word that most people gain an adrenaline of fear when thought of. Could you ever imagine the feeling of being buried alive? What could you do or how would you react? Conceive the idea of being stuck in a hole alive, deep in the murky ground without a soul in the world to know. It seems that this may frighten one due to the lack of control in the situation. This possibility or extreme fear that one might dwell on may lead many people to struggle with phobia tendencies. This specific phobia is called Taphephobia. One of the most extensive aversions in the nineteenth century was taphephobia. It has been a primal fear since the human race has been around, deeply embedded into our instincts. This medical term is derived from the Greek, “taphos” meaning “grave” and “phobia” meaning “fear” – fear of a grave or being put in a grave while one is still living. The death lead from premature burial is caused by a few different reasons, such as asphyxiation, dehydration, starvation, or hypothermia. Throughout history there has been a variety of tests to indicate that one is pledged dead prior to burial. Before medical science, people would wait to bury a person from days to even weeks, just to ensure the person was dead. Nowadays, doctors can usually determine when the fullness of death is certain by brain death. “Doctors must wait at least 24 hours after an electroencephalograph (EEG) has shown no brain activity, and then check again. If the second EEG is as flat as the first, the doctor can then assume that even if machines are keeping the patient breathing, his brain, and thus the patient, has died.” (Time Magazine 9) Prior to the nineteenth centuries, people were so terrified of being buried alive that they often included i... ... middle of paper ... ...7 in his home. Once his corpse had been decomposed, his ashes were buried next to his wife located in their family grave. Works Cited "Fear of Being Buried Alive." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, 15 Mar. 2011. Web. 14 Sept. 2011. . "IDEAS EXPLORED IN MAGIC-EYE." MAGIC-EYE. Web. 14 Sept. 2011. . Mcphee, Isaac M. "Taphephobia: The Fear of Being Buried Alive | Suite101.com." Isaac M. McPhee | Suite101.com. 3 Feb. 2008. Web. 14 Sept. 2011. . "Medicine: Defining Death - TIME." Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com. Time Magazine. Web. 14 Sept. 2011. .
First, discussions about end-of-life circumstances are unpleasant, hard, and often awkward. Instead, people tend to focus on the less probable circumstance of a treatment or cure. When confronted with giving the prognosis of terminal illness to a patient, Gawande states, “discussing a fantasy was easier- less emotional, less explosive, less prone to misunderstanding- than discussing what was happening before my eyes” (Gawande 169). Even as a medical professional, Gawande struggles with conversations about death and would rather focus on hopeful, yet less probable outcomes. Because of societal constructions and natural human response, the topic of death is avoided when possible, even if the subject of digression (i.e. experimental treatment or cure) is very unlikely to
"Taboos and Social Stigma - Rituals, Body, Life, History, Time, Person, Human, Traditional Views of Death Give Way to New Perceptions." Encyclopedia of Death and Dying. Web. 31 Jan. 2011. .
Fear of the unknown, and fear of what is to come in our lives, has generations of people wondering what will our lives be like tomorrow or the next day. Death is always there and we cannot escape it. Death is a scary thing. Our own mortality or the mortality of our loved ones scares us to the point that we sometimes cannot control how we are dealing with such a thing as the thought of death. Why do we fear such a thing as death? We don’t know what happens after we don’t how it feels. The fear of death is different for most but it is most certain to come and we cannot hide from it. For death is just around the corner and maybe it’s will come tomorrow or the next day! We fear not death, but the unknown that comes from death, that is the
Whereas the prevalence of unanticipated and premature deaths led to pre-industrial cultures to focus death fears on individuals' postmortem fates, the death fears of modern cultures are more likely to focus on the processes of dying. Thus contemporary fears of dying involve the anxieties of dying within institutional settings, where often life is structured for the convenience of staff and where residents suffer both physical and psychological pain in their depersonalization. They also involve fears of being victims of advanced Alzheimer's Disease: being socially dead and yet biologically alive. In sum, the dreaded liminality between the worlds of the living and the dead have historically shifted from the period after death to the period pre...
There’s a monster under your bed, and there are ghosts in the attic. The Bogey man is in your closet and ravens await your death so they can pick from your rotting flesh. Flowers are ready to strangle you, as pickles prepare to choke you in the night. It’s almost funny to hear of people who actually fear flowers and pickles. But these people have real legit fears of even the nicest of things. Although these fears are horrible, and should not be feared; I think the more we know about them, the more we can be prepared. There must be a deeper meaning of these weird phobias. Is it nature? Or inherited traits of the human body? Maybe they come from past experiences? Even as these fears are quite interesting, but unwanted, I want to know why people acquire these ridiculous fears and how we could stop them.
She opens up her essay by saying “How surprised [Yorick] would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.”(Mitford) Funerals are meant to protect people from seeing what kind of toll death has on their loved one; to remove the scars of being human. Kubler-Ross touches on this when she says “The more we are making advancements in science, the more we seem to fear and deny the reality of death. How is this possible? We use euphemisms, we make the dead look as if they were asleep” (Kubler-Ross) which connects to her opinion that death is feared and people take responsibility when a loved one dies, even if they had no impact on their death. The eradication of the sense of death is the key reason why the deceased are embalmed. Clifton Bryant discusses that the reason why people want to have their dead embalmed is because of “death anxiety”, that it is the collective phrase for all the different and complex fears of death. He later states that death anxiety is why we tend to have “death denial” and why we tend to avoid it wholly. “Likewise, the use of metaphors or euphemisms that serve to soften the harshness of death (e.g., passed away, deceased, expired) clearly represents a culturally approved attempt to deny or camouflage death's impact on our daily lives.”(Bryant) This reflects well on the point Mitford makes, when she says “[The funeral director] put on a well-oiled performance in which the concept of death played no part whatsoever” (Mitford) Kubler-Ross feels that death being ever increasingly more taboo the more
Living in a society where several cultures and religious beliefs are represented, such an event as memorable as death is bound to be celebrated differently. The paper attempts to look at the various ways different culture and religious practices prepare the body of the deceased for burial and the role of health care workers.
“I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday and I love today.” -William Allen White. We can’t speak for others with these fears, the fear of being forgotten or the fear of death or dying. Athazagoraphobia is being forgotten it goes along with this quote since others fear being forgotten the next day. As were thanatophobia is the fear of death or dying you might not love today and you might fear the next day. These two fears are alike and different in many ways. For an example, they both have different symptoms, or similarities like can take medicine to cure this fear. These fears don’t have many common symptoms, when it comes to diagnosing these fears. The contrast is, for athazagoraphobia feeling
"Robert waited—holding his breath—thinking they were going to be buried alive. But the heaving stopped at last and it appeared that whatever was going to collapse had done so." (Findley, 122)
Fear is an amazing emotion, in that it has both psychological as well as physiological effects on the human body. In instances of extreme fear, the mind is able to function in a way that is detached and connected to the event simultaneously. In “Feared Drowned,” Sharon Olds presents, in six brief stanzas, this type of instance. Her sparse use of language, rich with metaphors, similes and dark imagery, belies the horror experienced by the speaker. She closes the poem with a philosophical statement about life and the after-effects that these moments of horror can have on our lives and relationships.
...e for many in the modern Western world. Without getting in to the various medical definitions of death that exist, death can simply be defined as the absence of life. This is where the true fear stems from for most people, the idea that their existence will be known to this world. The uncertainty about what happens after death also plays a large role for many people as there is obviously no way to prove what happens after someone passes. It is clear that those who have this fear of death will have a hard time overcoming it, same as Jack. The point is not to get hung up on how to best push the fear out of your mind, but to instead find an alternative. That alternative is not clearly defined just as nothing is clearly defined in the novel, however it does give one the opportunity to see what happens when you let death control your thoughts instead of focusing on life.
Death is perceived as a bad thing to most people in the world, though it is natural and inevitable. Every person who has ever lived has also died and so will everyone who ever lives. So why are people so afraid of it? Is it because death entails an endless blackness and lack of anything or anyone? Or as others believe, is it because death is a permanent end to life? It must be that people fear death because it deprives us of the good things life brings such as feeling, emotion, and perception among other things. Thomas Nagel raised three problems with this irrational fear of death:
An intense, irrational fear of an object or situation that is not likely to be dangerous is called phobia. Phobia is the Greek word for “morbid fear,” after the Greek god photos. Phobias are usually named using Greek word for the feared object or situation, followed by the suffix phobia. There are thousands of phobias like A...
What is death? What makes death such an avoided subject? According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, death is defined as: the permanent cessation of vital functions; the end of life. So maybe we fear death and death’s process because the thought of life ending is unbearable or because we know little about the dying process and naturally, as humans, we fear the unknown. These all may be true and in most cases probably are. But if one was to take a look at death and the process and consider the true meaning of that very moment in one’s life, maybe we would view it differently and maybe, just maybe, see life itself in a whole new way?! Marie de Hennezel, in her book Intimate Death defines death as . . . “our life’s culmination, it’s crowning moment and what gives it both sense and worth” (xi). She sheds light on the positive side of death, the part no one thinks about or acknowledges. And she shows us that death can in fact make us see how amazing life can be. In his book, The Body Silent, Robert Murphy shares with us the changes in life and actions of society when faced with the process of death.
Death is a topic everyone will witness countless times during his or her lifetime. Death of loved ones’, animals, or strangers are just few examples of experiences that can mold one’s impression of death. Since I am rather young, I have only truly experienced death on few occasions. One of which was the death of my grandfather. He was in a lot of pain and was bedridden for months. For him, death was almost inevitable and was an answer to the pain he was feeling. I’m not 100% definite how I personally perceive death, but because of my grandfather, I always think of death as being imperative, yet inevitable. I have a great fear for death, because I know how much pain it causes loved ones.