11/20/2025
Preparing for the Death of Someone You Love (Part 18)
Social Tasks:
Social tasks when death is imminent concern personal attachments that you and your loved one value, as well as interactions with society and its social groups.
For example, you and your loved one may or may not at this time be interested in politics, former duties at work, sports, Fraternal organizations, or a large circle of friends. Instead, your loved one and you may prefer to focus on a narrower scope of interests and a more limited group of important family members and friends.
Spiritual Tasks:
Religious or spiritual tasks are likely to involve seeking ways to identify or formulate meaning for your loved one's life, death, suffering, and humanity. Your own search for meaning in these matters will be equally important. You both may want to feel that life is meaningful and thus worthwhile. In addition, the 2 of you may also want to feel connected with others and with the divine or the transcendent in your lives.
That may especially involve some type of hope, whether:
*Religious in nature, such as:
-To be absolved of sin.
-To achieve eternal bliss.
*Non-religious in nature:
-To find one's place in a reality that is more than just a
particular moment in the life of the universe.
-To become one with the elements.
-To continue to contribute to the life of society through
one's creations, students and descendants even after
one has died.
There is No Universal Goal to Achieve:
In all of these tasks, there is no universal goal that you and your loved one have to achieve. There are no particular reactions or set phases that have to be lived through and no specific goal or type of closure that must be accomplished before death occurs. Dying is a part of living. Each of us has lived his or her life differently; so, too, each of us can die his or her death differently.
For most of us, how we die is likely to be similar to how we have lived-at least how we lived in difficult times in our earlier years. For all of us, there is no prescribed path or preordained mold that we must follow or fit into in the critical time at the end of our lives.
