Beware of anyone who puts a number on how long someone has to live. There are so many factors that affect the time of our gradual death that the closest anyone can get to determining how long the dying process will take is months, weeks, days or hours. Numbers don’t work when they are based only on lab reports and disease markers. The medical findings contribute to a prognosis but the personality of the person will affect the actual time of death.
There are several important factors affecting the amount of time in which we die a gradual death that the medical model does not take into account.
Because we deal with the challenge of dying in the same way we have dealt with other challenges in our life –that affects how long our experience is going to be. Because our personality doesn’t change but actually intensifies its characteristics –that affects how long our experience is going to be. Because we have limited control over the exact time that we die – that affects how long our experience is going to be.
To get a gauge of how long someone is going to live once they have been told they can’t be fixed we need to closely examine these three things: how they have met other challenges in their life; the kind of personality they have (active, passive, controlling, argumentative, easy going, protective) and to acknowledge that they have a small amount of control over the exact moment they take their last breath.
