It is more beneficial to see dementia as an effect of life, rather than a cause of death. With the perspective that life happens to me, it follows that death also happens to me. When I believe that death happens to me, I fear that it may not be either pain-free or natural. When the nature of death is unknown, it is a cause for fear. Whatever we fear in life, we face before death. When I fear that death is not natural, I am suspicious and need to know the cause.
A certified cause of death ensures that there are no suspicious circumstances that may have caused it. We expect to die naturally and are suspicious of any unnatural death. When I believe that life happens by me, then suicide or taking my own life is a possible cause of death. Suicide is seen as neither natural nor suspicious, whereas accidental death may be seen as normal but not suspicious.
Dementia is neither suicide nor an accident and it is not seen as natural although it is becoming more normal or common. Dementia is quickly becoming a common illness in old age and a common cause of death. Whereas dying of old age is seen as a natural cause of death, dying of dementia is not.
Generally speaking, people do not die of mental illness, so why would dementia be seen as a cause of death?
Dementia is a mental incapacity, which affects memory & choice but nobody ever died because they forgot to live and choosing to die is suicide not dementia. Nobody ever chooses to die from dementia, even though many are dying with dementia, and nobody consciously chooses to live with dementia, unless that is you are a carer.
The belief that the physical body is an organic mechanical device, driven by a brain that causes consciousness, allows the belief that someone can forget to breathe. This is based on the belief that breathing & heart rate are a function of the brain when in fact there is no scientific evidence for this to be true. People who are considered brain dead can be indefinitely kept alive in intensive care, which makes it difficult to believe that it is the deterioration of the brain that causes death.
When life appears to happen by accident, then death appears to happen by accident and when life appears to happen naturally, so does death. When I see dementia as a natural decline towards a natural death, it becomes an effect of death and not a cause. Life & death are relative states of being. I can see myself experiencing a long slow lingering death from an early age or I can see myself experiencing a relatively fulfilling life growing with age.
How we all individually choose to live our own life is a personal choice, unless we abdicate that choice to someone else by not making our own choice. When I believe that others will have to look after me when I get older, then that is my choice and it will surely become my experience. When I believe that old age is something that I will suffer from, then I surely will suffer in old age from what I believe are the symptoms of old age. Just because old age has symptoms doesn’t mean that I have to suffer it being a disease.
Pain is not an inherent part of life but an inherent part of my fear of dying. When I believe that death is a negative perspective of life, I can die a thousand deaths in just one life-time. It is my negative perspective of life that makes my life painful. When I perceive life in a positively beneficial way, there is no pain present.
When I see dementia as a positive and beneficial end to life, there is no pain. Dementia is not an emotional illness, therefore there is no inherent pain. Painkillers are designed to mentally numb the brain’s awareness of negative emotional signals that are being transmitted through the nervous system. Dementia may heighten an awareness of pain but it is never the cause of pain. Dementia is not inherently painful although it may create side effects that are. Once all the side-effects of dementia are isolated and successfully treated, it is pain free; which means that it offers a pain free death.
When my perspective is that life happens through me, then I allow death to be an experience that also happens through me, when I allow it to. I allow death to happen through me when I choose for it to happen through me, when I choose it. When life happens through me, death happens through me and I live through the death of an old and no longer wanted physical body.
Dementia is a very slow process of forgetting that I am just a physical being having a physical experience called life.