AP52627

__ Death, dying and bereavement __ I’m writing this paragraph with personal experiences of watching family members and friends handle their health problems and, eventually, their deaths. My mother, father, and brothers James, Walter, Joseph, Adam, passed away from heart disease. My friend James and my nephew David passed away from cancer. I am the youngest of 10 children and it’s been extremely hard on me watching my older siblings fall ill and die. Most troubling is that when they passed on, I wasn’t able to go to any of my brothers’ funerals because I lived out of state and didn’t have the funds to travel. This weighed heavily on my mind for a long time. In reading the text for our class (Human growth and development) and articles from the internet, I found that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and her five stages of grief – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance – and The Grief Recovery Method, did not affect me in that way. I mean that I went through different stages at different times. I’m still going through the stages even today. When my father, James Thogode, passed away, I was living out of state. When I received word of his passing, it did hurt me very much but I kept my emotions together and went to New Jersey to attend his funeral. After the funeral, I stayed with my mother and talked with his friends and other people that knew him and in this I accepted his death. When my mother, Beatrice M. Thogode, passed away I was living in Northern Virginia. This hit me hard because my mother and I were working on reestablishing our relationship. Again, I went to New Jersey to attend her funeral and then deal with my remaining siblings. This was very hard, I went through anger, depression, and then acceptance. I was really hit hard when my nephew, David, developed cancer. He was always in good health, and then to be diagnosed with lung, pancreatic cancer, and prostate cancer, didn’t seem fair. I went through denial, anger, and then had to accept that he was dying. Seeing him suffer and not being able to help him made it even harder. When he passed away, they had a memorial for him. However, my wife Sarah and I could not attend because we were contagious with the flu. I went in a very deep depression because of this. Our friend, James Morris, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I went into denial and then anger, because, like my nephew and James, they were younger than me. This put me in denial and feeling why them not me. Jim passed away and left his wife and two grown daughters. At this time, our next door neighbor has stage 4 cancer. When we found out about it, we were angry and in disbelief. We intellectually know what is happening. It is very hard watching our friend and his family dealing with his sickness. We are trying to accept it. We know it's only a matter of time before we will attend his funeral.

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