Midterm Examination

DIRECTIONS:

The Midterm Examination calls for you to reflect on the main issue or question that the course has raised for you so far. How does it relate to your experience or what you wanted to learn?

You need to demonstrate that you:

• Have read the text.
• Examined your personal beliefs, values, and reactions as they relate to the issue or question.

What are you learning about yourself, and the situation you are studying or experiencing? This part of the Exam is often the most meaningful to the professor and you because the learning becomes personalized. The teacher can see that you have considered how the course relates to you.

You may use the textbook and any other resources that you choose, but you must cite your sources.

THE MIDTERM EXAM SHOULD BE  around 3 TYPED, 12 FONT, DOUBLED-SPACED PAGES.

Only upload your paper to Canvas in Mircosoft Word (doc, docx, or pdf). Canvas does not accept Google.docs. Do not send through email.

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HERE IS AN EXAMPLE OF AN INSIGHTFUL EXAMINATION:     

This class has been important to my awareness and development. As someone who has had the experience of burying his parents (not literally burying them; but pertinent to this class, having planned all their funeral arrangements, been at their sides when they died, and walked through the initiation of each of their funerals and the long, slow grieving process); losing close friends who are just a bit older than me; seeing others, even younger, facing Stage IV cancer; and becoming increasingly aware of my own mortality; I am grateful for the opportunity to think practically, purposefully, passionately, and precisely about the inescapable fact of death and dying. I appreciate the way the class is structured as a sort of slow-moving initiation into the many-faceted passages as time marches us towards the one inevitability, death.    The textbook does a good job in oscillating between a broad sweep of the subject, and various ‘close-ups’, whether it be into culture, religion, or the sheer mechanics of the ‘death system.’    My approach to this exam will be to reach for that depth experience anyways. The best way I can do that, I believe, is to take key passages that really caught my interest, or moved me and use those as springboards to probe my own experience and reflections.     I must admit that the fourth chapter, on ‘Death Systems’ was hard for me to read, triggering of so many memories that remain scarred, even approaching a decade later. The authors inform us that “The components of a death system include people (Funeral directors, life insurance agents, weapons designers, people who care for the dying), places (cemeteries, funeral homes, battlefields, war memorials, disaster sites) times (memorial days and religious commemorations such as Good Friday, anniversaries of important battles, Halloween, (objects) (obituraries, tombstones, hearses, the electric chair) and symbols (black armbands, funeral music, skull and crossbones, language used to talk about death). My experience with my father dying on September 11, 2010, and my mother dying on February 8, 2011 brought me front row and center into the Death System that any dutiful son will meet when surrendering the people who created and raised one to their final ‘resting’ place.     What I remembered most vividly was the night my mother died. From the moment that she firmly decided to die at home rather than return once again to the hospital to try and manage her diabetes, I, as the only child present (my next oldest brother lives in Pennsylvania, and my oldest brother who lives in Rancho Mirage could not deal with the spectacle—or the system—of death, so he stayed away), entered into a fast-moving relationship with the death system. Decisions had to be made—including that first one not to call an ambulance. What I want to emphasize here was that from the moment that decision to die at home was made, and from the drawing closer to death itself, the experience inducted unto itself all sorts of other ‘players’ from the death system. While my heart was breaking and I was reeling with the awesome experience of Death coming for the woman who gave birth to me, I was, simultaneously dealing with a flurry of practical considerations. In our culture, you cannot ignore the death system. I called the funeral home, or rather, the 1-800 number that I had. Within a few hours, two men dressed in dark suits arrived, but not before the police had come, and even a 911 unit, who attempted, against all logic and sensibility to ‘resurrect’ my mom from the dead, apparently, standard operating behaviors. I was asked to step out of her bedroom while the emergency workers vainly sought to revive her. I was allowed to stay in the room once the somber representatives from Forest Lawn appeared. They were there to retrieve my mother’s body. While I did find that they treated her corpse with a sort of sober reverence, it all seemed very impersonal, even cold—perhaps as it must be. In fact, perhaps their very somberness allowed me to face the sheer finality of death with the requisite starkness needed to really take it in.     One small feature that seems noteworthy is that the death system has about it a certain authority and by-the-book-quality. I remember wondering if I could get in trouble, legally speaking, for not calling an ambulance, yet again, to rush my mother to the hospital in order to prolong her life, yet again, by a few more days? Was I an accomplice to a sort of suicide? At 87 years-old, with a decisive and imperious ‘no’ given to me when I asked about calling, I had to honor my mother’s wishes over the clinical imperatives of the death system. I bring this example up to show how the authority of the death system can mess with our natural instincts. As the authors say, and as Aries says, for thousands of years, people always died at home. As Nietzsche said, some things are ‘beyond good and evil,’ or as Bob Dylan sang, “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” In honoring my mother’s wish, I was respecting a higher death system, or so I tell myself.     I’d like to close out my reflections about how the reading helped me ‘process’ my mother’s death, by first quoting from the fifth chapter of the text: “Dying, like birthing is a natural event, sometimes better witnessed than managed. Caregivers are called upon to put aside their own beliefs to discover what’s appropriate for a particular person in a particular situation. Care of the dying, as Balfour Mount observes, involves both heart and mind: ‘The dying need the friendship of the heart with its caring, acceptance, vulnerability and reciprocity. They also need the skills of the mind embodied in competent medical care. Neither alone is sufficient.’”     This quote brought me right back to an experience I had a few weeks before my mom’s death, when we were at Eisenhower Hospital yet again, her having been (yet again) rushed there in an ambulance. It was twilight, and I was sitting by my mother’s bed. My father, as I said, had died a few months earlier. My brothers, for reasons also stated, were not present. My marriage had just fallen into separation, and my beloved son was with his mother this night. I felt very alone, and I was obviously aware that we were artificially extending my mother’s life. A large nurse, whom I had seen earlier in the day, came in and began speaking to me. Her voice was soft, but firm. I had the sense she was speaking ‘off-the-record.’     She said, “I have just one question for you: Is it more compassionate to hold on, or to let your mother go?” I didn’t answer her directly at the time, I just said, “Thank you for saying that.” Her care, both for my mother and myself, was truly consistent with this notion of attending to both the heart and mind in this rite-of-passage situation. This brings home to me something that is threaded throughout the chapters: A good death requires a team of skilled and compassionate caregivers. When we give our hearts to the passage, not just our clinical or legalistic minds, we open the possibility of beginning to harvest some of the bittersweet, but deep and profound ‘gifts’ of death. (Read The Wild Edge of Sorrow, by Francis Weller, for more on this…)