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Living with DyingArrow
Carers
Interview 40  

Interview 40

Age at Interview: 49
Sex: Female
Background: Housewife, married, 3 children
Brief outline:Daughter of a man who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in June 2001, at the age of 81, and who died in October 2001.


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Female
Her father was afraid of dying and she found it hard to comfort him because he didn't have faith in any religion.

 



We were talking about preparing for death in a spiritual sense. Can you say anything about that in relation to your father?

Well the difficulty with my father was that he was an agnostic stroke atheist, I don't quite know what you'd call it and there is a difficulty I think with people who don't have a faith or a philosophy about that because when you get to the stage where you are facing death there doesn't seem to be any support. You know if he'd been a Jew or a Catholic or a Hindu perhaps you know the rabbi or the priest or whatever would have come in to talk to him and he would have felt - I would hope - very comforted by that. But for him death was going to mean nothingness and I don't quite know how you support people through that. 

Again that isn't what I think and we had several discussions and then we had very moving and tender father/daughter talks about dying. And I did try and put my point of view because it's the only one I've got to put in the hope that it would in some way comfort him. But I know that he was frightened of dying and I don't know how you help people who are frightened of dying and who don't believe there's any sort of afterlife. I don't know what you can do. But there certainly isn't anything coming in from outside if you like.
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