From Hamlet Act 3 Scene 1:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a
consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream:
ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
What is death?
These sentences in bold letters are my favorites. Remember me blogging about me
playing the role of Hamlet during our class play? Well yea, these are the lines
I felt most emotions on. We used the modern version of the play though. Let's
analyze the lines. I am no expert on this. Please do remember that I am just a 16
year old girl who has just stepped into college two months ago. :)
Note: As you read
on, keep in mind these are just my own interpretation. These are basically
based on my own level of understanding. :)
These lines
focuse on the question "Is it better to be alive or dead?". Because
of all the numerous and countless problems life brings us, sometimes we tend to
think that it may be actually better to die than to live and having to go
through all those. Hamlet feels that way. Being alive means endless hurting.
Dying is a sleep that ends it all. Is it really better to be dead though? Yes,
being alive will just bring us heartaches but always keep in mind that it is
the same thing that brings us happiness. Death won't get us anywhere and won't
make our dreams come true, so attempting suicide to "just end it all"
is not appropriate if we want to live a fulfilled life.
Why do I talk of
death out of all the things I could possibly blog about? Why talk of death when
I could just be enjoying being alive?
Recently, close
friends of mine's relatives die. My boyfriend's grandma passed away on April
29, 2012. Not even after four months has passed, on August 2, his dad passed
away too. He never got a chance to introduce me to his grandma--- oh he did, at
her wake. :( I only knew his dad for 5 months. It was on March 5, 2012 approximately
6:00 PM., at the tennis court of where they live, Ferndale Homes. I will never
forget that day 'cause that was the day that started the "thing"
between me and my boyfriend. I remember my boyfriend telling me stories about
his dad and how they bond. His dad was the perfect family guy. I'm glad I got to hear him tell me I was
pretty that one night my boyfriend attended a debut party. He was such a good
man. A week ago, a close family friend of ours passed away, too. Yesterday, my
bestfriend, Ellysa, lost her grandpa.
When people die,
their loved ones left on earth feel mixed emotions. These emotions then lead to
questions. Why do people have to die? Why is there such thing as death? Why
can't people just live forever? Is there life after death? After losing someone
so dear to us... what do we do? Where do we go from there? These questions,
however, are questions only we, ourselves, could answer.
How do we answer
these? My boyfriend's mom talks of the 5 stages of grief. I did a research and
this is what I got.
The Five Stages
of Grief according to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler are Denial,
Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. I was so amazed by these that I
feel like I really have to post them here.
Denial
This first stage of grieving helps us to survive the
loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes
no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we
can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply
get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival
possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in
denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle. As you
accept the reality of the loss and start to ask yourself questions, you are
unknowingly beginning the healing process. You are becoming stronger, and the
denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were
denying begin to surface.
Anger
Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be
willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly
feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There
are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but
anger is the emotion we are most used to managing. The truth is that anger has
no limits. It can extend not only to your friends, the doctors, your family,
yourself and your loved one who died, but also to God. You may ask, “Where is
God in this? Underneath anger is pain, your pain. It is natural to feel
deserted and abandoned, but we live in a society that fears anger. Anger is
strength and it can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness
of loss. At first, grief feels like being lost at sea: no connection to
anything. Then you get angry at someone, maybe a person who didn’t attend the
funeral, maybe a person who isn’t around, maybe a person who is different now
that your loved one has died. Suddenly you have a structure – - your anger
toward them. The anger becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from
you to them. It is something to hold onto; and a connection made from the
strength of anger feels better than nothing. We usually know more about
suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is just another indication of the
intensity of your love.
Bargaining
Before a loss, it seems like you will do anything
if only your loved one would be spared. “Please God, ” you bargain, “I will
never be angry at my wife again if you’ll just let her live.” After a loss,
bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if I devote the rest
of my life to helping others. Then can I wake up and realize this has all been
a bad dream?”We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements.
We want life returned to what is was; we want our loved one restored. We want
to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly,
stop the accident from happening…if only, if only, if only. Guilt is often bargaining’s
companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we
“think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain. We
will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past,
trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages
as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to
feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and
then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear
fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.
Depression
After bargaining, our attention moves squarely
into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives
on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as
though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression
is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a great
loss. We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness, wondering,
perhaps, if there is any point in going on alone? Why go on at all? Depression
after a loss is too often seen as unnatural: a state to be fixed, something to
snap out of. The first question to ask yourself is whether or not the situation
you’re in is actually depressing. The loss of a loved one is a very depressing
situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not
experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss
fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved one didn’t get
better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. If grief
is a process of healing, then depression is one of the many necessary steps
along the way.
Acceptance
Acceptance is often confused with the notion of
being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case. Most
people don’t ever feel OK or all right about the loss of a loved one. This
stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and
recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality. We will never like
this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with
it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. We must try to live
now in a world where our loved one is missing. In resisting this new norm, at
first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In
time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot
maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We
must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on
ourselves. Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones.
As we begin to live again and enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so,
we are betraying our loved one. We can never replace what has been lost, but we
can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies.
Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we
grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in
their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with
ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given
grief its time. At times, people in grief will often report more stages. Just
remember your grief is as unique as you are.
Source: http://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/
All these are
necessary to the healing process. They state everything that I do not have
anything to say anymore. :) I have to end this post in some way, though. Let me
just say that for us to be able to live our life to the fullest, let us be
content and live each day like it's going to be our last. We'll never know what
may happen. Dream, pray, love, and live. Goodnight! :)
