Death is something I've never been comfortable talking about unless it was caring for someone else. I was able to work in Hospice with other peoples loved ones but that was as far as I could go. My grandmother died a few weeks back and I went to say my goodbyes to her and it was the hardest thing I have ever experienced. I took one look at her and I knew it was close. She was a wonderful Christian woman, she wasn't the least bit scared because she knew she was going home. The very last thing she said to me was, "Don't be scared, remember I will always love you." She died two days later. She left my grandfather behind, and he's not an easy man to understand. I remembered the Kubler-Ross's Stages of Grief and he was in denial from the time we put her on hospice until the day of her funeral. On the day of her funeral something changed. He left the funeral, without saying goodbye to anyone, and angry.
Watching my sick grandmother slowly pass was what I think of when I think of death and dying. I knew there was other ways to die but it never really dawned on me that people actually die in other ways. Clinical death is technically when the person has stopped breathing and their heart is no longer beating. This can be reversed by CPR which is why I urge almost everyone I know to know how to do CPR. Another type of death is Brain Death. This generally happens when there is a lack of oxygen for about 8-10 minutes. Once brain death has occurred a person will enter a permanent coma, while the body can remain alive until the brain stem ceases to function. Then the person is dead. Biological death happens after clinical or brain death. This happens when the rest of the body functions begin to stop working, when it is "no longer possible to descern an electrical charge in the tissues of the heart and lungs".
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