Death is a topic many of us try to avoid but none of us escapes from experiencing. As a child we may experience the death of a loved pet, or grandparent, school friend or teacher. Many children lose a parent to death at a very young age. Adults experience loss with more frequency as we age and those we love age. Death comes to our spouses; friends, co-workers, neighbors and some adults experience the death of their children. The one experience with death we all contemplate at one time or another is our own eventual death.

When our thoughts turn to our own death we often think about how much pain we may experience, or if we will be helpless (in a coma or suffering from stroke), will we be dependent on others or on machines towards the end of our life, and also we think about how our loved ones will endure our death.

As we contemplate our own death it is natural to think about what comes after our physical bodies die. Is there an afterlife? What happens to our spirit? What happens to our body?

Those who are given the news that their illness or accident is terminal (will result in death) and are given an approximate guess as to when death will occur have the fortunate or unfortunate (depending on how you look at it) opportunity to answer some of these questions or at least to have some input as to how they will be answered.

Dr. Kubler-Ross' stages of grief are illustrated in her book "On Death and Dying" in which she explains that there are stages of death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. We all go through stages of grief as we come to grips with our own death. We may have a brief visit to a certain stage and linger in another stage. We may go through all the stages described in her book or we may go through only some of them. We all pace ourselves differently as we immerse ourselves in coping mechanisms that allow us to process the idea of, and then the reality of our own death.

Those who study death have various opinions about what the process of dying involves at least on a mental or emotional level. What is agreed upon by most no matter the level of expertise is that all of us face different deaths and we face our own death in our own unique way. There are individuals who make a living supporting or guiding those who are dying by giving them information to help them make decisions or to make sense of the process. In the end, when we face the ultimate grief we do so with the tools we have learned in our lifetime and by leaning on the support systems available to us. The state of our physical body will certainly have some say in how we process our death. Certainly someone in a coma will process approaching death differently than someone who is mentally alert and functioning on a normal level of cognitive ability.