...to Hospice care: A new American way of death?

This article, talking about the increasing rate of Americans which die in the care of a hospice, interested me because of my grandmother and great-Grandfather who were both cared for by a hospice. My grandmother actually spent the last week of her life in the hospital, but my great-grandfather died at his daughter's, my maternal grandmother, home in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was cared for during the last six months or so of his life by my grandma, my mother, and several loving hospices. They came to his funeral and joined in our mourning, even if it was more of a contract termination than a deep loss, it meant a lot to my family that the gentleman who came cared enough to do so.

In the article, this paragraph really stuck out to me.

Once, death was played out in the community. Families took care of their dying. And few people, including children, were shielded from the harsh realities of deterioration at the end of life.

I felt that while it may be generally true, the statement was not true for my family, and what the reporter was describing as uncommon, was common in my family. With every death we have experienced, care has been taken by the family, and in many ways, we have readjusted our our norms to reflect the current needs of a brother, sister, mother, grandmother, and grandfather before their deaths.

Nonetheless, the article pointed out some interesting things about how our society deals with death.

Father Wayne Wilson, a police chaplain said, "We have separated ourselves from death."

This fact is only more powerfully illustrated by the statistics in the article, which report that 40 percent of terminally-ill Americans die in hospitals, but 5,000 hospice programs exist for the care of our family members, and these programs are being taken advantage of in the event of illness and potential death.