I’m a hospice volunteer, and have been with many people as they died. I believe you are assessing the situation from your own fears. Here is what I have observed:
The dying person detaches from consciousness (this may appear as sleep, but I feel it is not sleep, but a lack of consciousness). Their body takes some time to stop its automatic processes.
What you see as a struggle to breathe, in my opinion is the exact opposite. It’s a struggle to stop breathing. The death is already occurring, the irregular breathing is the effect, not the cause.
I have held hands with some special folks as they were dying…their eyes opening and closing at times, some unexpected movements to discharge energy, their breathing shallow and irregular.
One of those people was my grandmother. After my grandmother’s death, my grandfather no longer wanted to live. He began to refuse food and most water. He wanted to die and told us that it was hard to get his body to stop living. It took him about a week.
None of the people I shared time with expressed fear or pain in death. Dying is a natural process, but a process none-the-less. It takes time.
My husband died recently next to me on the bed. Before he was injected with a injection he held my hand and kept looking at me as if want to say final goodbye. I asked him so politely What you want to say ,or you need but he never said anything quite cool and calm. He turned his face to other side. He was injected and went asleep by 11.30. Started snoring. I also slept but woke up to check at 1.30 touched his face ,hands and feet all cold.
No energy to cry or shout called my nephew to check. He came to check and hold me tight to say that Dada is no more. He never cried, he never called or shouted just by my side gone peacefully. I went in anxiety and depression can’t believe that he is no more. Still going through unbearable pain don’t know how long.
I was a RN and even before as an aide I saw many die. My great grandmother died sitting in a chair watching TV with a smile on her face. I have also seen horrific death like a woman suffering a major stroke. I was taking her blood pressure while waiting for the EMTs, she had such a look of fear on her face. I tried to calm her but she died while I was taking her BP, I heard her last heart beat. One elderly woman was hemorrhaging out of a colostomy stoma.
She was laughing and in her mind was at a picnic in her childhood. She had no clue she was dying and suffered no pain. Another was a man who had broken a leg water skiing and was found to have terminal bone cancer, very advanced and they had told him he had maybe 3 months left.
He was terrified but his family wouldn’t come because they claimed it hurt them too badly. They didn’t care that he needed their help so we took turns sitting beside him at night. He died while I was holding his hand. His eyes just closed and he seemed to fall asleep. I had to check his pulse then grabbed a stethoscope to be sure then called the supervisor (I was an aide at the time).
I also saw my father die. He was in the last stages of congestive heart failure but refused to return to the hospital. He was in a rehab facility. We knew it would be soon and stayed all through the day. In the early evening he had to go to the bathroom. The nurses helped him get up and walk in. When he came out he was still talking to us normally. He sat down on the bed and with the help of two nurses laid down. By the time he was flat on his back he was gone.
No pain, no struggle, no fear, just gone. Most of the deaths I have seen were similar though some did suffer pain or difficulty breathing. It pretty much depended a lot on the illnesses or injuries the patients had. I don’t think most of us will know until the end how it will be. I hope mine will be like my dad’s or great grandmother’s.
No, not necessarily. I’ll give you an example: At a dialysis clinic I worked at, one of my friends was a patient care tech that monitored the treatment of three or four patients at a time while they had their dialysis treatments. When he was making one of his rounds, one of his patients that day was an elderly woman who other than needing dialysis, seemed to be in good health. She was probably in her ’80s
He told me that as he took her blood pressure he asked her how she was feeling, and she said, “Fine, fine”. He wrote down her vitals and moved on to his next patient.
Later, as he did his next set of rounds, he came to her chair and hesitated for a moment, he didn’t want to wake her up because she was sleeping; many dialysis patients nap while they take their 3-hour treatments, since they typically don’t move from the chair during that time.
But he wrapped the blood pressure cuff around her arm and asked her how she was feeling… but she did not respond this time.
She had no pulse. And the dialysis machine was still chugging along, still doing its job, and oblivious to the fact she was gone.
She had drifted asleep and died quietly and peacefully, even with other patients dialyzing on either side of her, patients who also did not realize she had passed away.
(Only because someone might point this out, the machine does monitor blood pressure, but those older machines only monitored blood pressure within the bloodline circuit on the machine, and the blood pump of the machine created its own pressure, which the machine monitored.
Now, newer dialysis machines can automatically take a patient’s blood pressure from the cuff on their arm, and will alert staff if it detects an abnormal blood pressure.)
