Maybe, but most people mentioned in the article apparently die from heart attacks, and you don't know when it's going to happen - so it's not like you "know" and expect death to come around the corner. It could have literally happened when that person was shopping out, too.
I also didn't quite understand the family comment either. Whose family are you talking about?
When you are born, you have your mom (and possibly Dad) around you. But as you grow older, Mom and Dad will pass away and you'll thus be alone. Unless you have kids, you'll die alone.
Even if you do have kids, life happens. I know plenty of people who don't talk to their kids or they hate their mom or dad and there is no relation. Thus some people have died alone.
I think some people have this fantasy, that they are on their death bed and there is 3 generations weeping around them.
Sorry, but is this even true any more? Quite honestly for me. I'm quite happy to leave as unnoticed.
Oh and another thing. Friends. Unless you make seriously good friends and not those on facebook or acquaintances. They may be around you a long time. But I have rarely met someone in their 50s/60s that still knows their childhood friends.
So strike that one off the list. I think a life well-meant is what you did with it. Rather than who is in it.
Well, at least here in my Southern European country, it sure is. While there are many more elderly people dying alone than a couple of decades ago, I'd say most people I know still keep in close contact with their parents and grandparents, and they spend their last days (usually in the hospital) with them.
In fact, that's one thing I always found disconcerting in online conversations with US Americans - the willingness to just move hundreds of miles from their parents and grandparents. I've never considered myself a family-oriented person -I've always disliked family reunions and the "you have to go visit your great-uncle"- but the idea of leaving now, when my grandmothers probably just have a few more years to live, just sounds so ungrateful and selfish :|
In practice, this doesn't seem to occur often: http://phys.org/news/2010-05-americans-surprisingly-mothers....
I've regretted not being able to be there for the passing of one of my grandparents, and in general the entire family has and will be there at their last moments if they can make it. Not to mention doing what we can to ensure that they are taken care of and happy.
I think you hit it spot on with this. My dad's father died after parking his car in his garage. My mom's father died in his sleep. His wife (my mom's mom) died in an elderly care home in the middle of the day a year later. Between both sets of grandparents, there were 30 grandchildren. None of us had seen them in a few weeks at the times of their deaths. It's not like we weren't close, they all just sort of died unexpectedly. None of them were sick or anything.
This may seem odd in logical terms but it seems to be a common understanding, and it's found in movies, books, etc.
[edit]It might be analagous to children who don't want to fall asleep without an adult with them. They are scared by the darkness and don't want to go through something scary alone.
It's not about "logical objective reasoning" either. Treating people bad for example. Nothing "logical" about it being more wrong that treating them nice (especially if it benefits you to do so). But the culture we co-created and live in makes it wrong (and that's a good thing).
Yeah, or degenerating, one could say. It also happened in the last days of Rome...
>Conversely, society has condoned and even encouraged things that are horribly unfair.
Well, it's a balancing act. Society doesn't mean people get a free pass to abandon personal judgement. That said, all those "horribly unfair" things seem horribly unfair to us, from a distance. To their own society they looked perfectly normal.