Homework 26

Christopher R 12/27/10

1. The idea of death is kept in hospitals.
2. How you’re supposed to react to death.
3. The idea of whether or not children should be exposed to death in the family.
4. Death is something people don’t talk about.
5. A poor person in France can have a longer life than a rich person in the United States. (http://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/graph_month/life_expectancy_france/) (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:USA&dl=en&hl=en&q=united+states+life+expectancy+graph#met=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:USA:FRA)

I think Sicko was a good film to talk about the history of health insurance and the disadvantages that the health insurance companies have but it doesn’t really talk about the dominant social practices of death. I think the thing that helped the most was when Evan’s mother came in to speak about her personal experience. This is because when you have someone dictating to you about how they feel about death through a screen it aren’t as emotional or sentimental as when you are face to face with someone. Getting to hear the person as they sit right in front of you, and share something that is usually seen as a topic not to talk about there is more to be learned. Especially from my point of view, I have never had anyone close to me die and that shields me from the actual emotion that a death in the family could bring. It’s much easier to understand and sympathize with a person who you now, never see anything wrong with them and then hear about what they had to go through as they speak about death in their family.

The question that has gotten to me this whole unit is how you are supposed to act when someone close to you dies. There are so many different kinds of people in the world and to say that someone is supposed to act a certain way about someone else is perplexing. Personally I have been to a few funerals and some of them were the funerals of family members but I had never had never cried. At the funeral it seems like everyone feels they have to cry and most of the tears are exaggerated. People jumping around the church and falling to the floor is not a notion that will bring the dead person back so what’s the purpose of sobbing about their non-existence. Another question I had is what the origin of a formal funeral is, the actual purpose of a funeral because I feel like these two things would give me an idea of why so many people use funerals as a way of saying goodbye. If there is any other popular form of remembering the dead and if so why isn’t it as televised? I think the way we can go about finding this would be more research but as for the way people are supposed to act I think it has a lot to do with what people see in the media.