2022 Volume 31 Issue 2 Pages 181-189
This study is a follow-up to the first report, which examined the relationship between awareness of late-stage medical care and views on life and death among older people living at home in the Izumo region of Japan. The study aims to qualitatively analyse and clarify aspects relating to the reasoning regarding views on life and death of older people living at home in the Izumo region, thereby gaining insight on how to support the spread of advance care planning for older people.
An awareness survey was distributed to 800 senior citizens club members, yielding a total of 550 responses. Of those, 252 responses were analysed, excluding those where participants failed to fill in the fields on their personal attributes and views on life and death in both yes/no and open-ended response fields.
The analysis generated 23 categories: ‘death is inevitable’; ‘everything ends when you die’; ‘some deaths cannot be controlled’; ‘I am prepared for death’; ‘I take a philosophical view on death’; ‘it’s no use thinking about death’; ‘I have a vague idea of death’; ‘I have some regrets in this world’; ‘I don’t want to think about death because it frightens me’; ‘I believe in the teachings and experiences of religion’; ‘this world and the afterlife are connected’; ‘I expect physical and mental pain’; ‘the world [of death] is unknowable’; ‘there is no suffering in the afterlife’; ‘death doesn’t seem real to me’; ‘I value each day as it comes’; ‘I do not run away from suffering in life’; ‘I contribute to my family and the community’; ‘life can be extended through individual effort and medical progress’; ‘I strive to find a mission’; ‘I don’t think about what happens after death’; ‘not knowing when I will die enables me to live’; ‘I hope my descendants will prosper’. These were grouped into three core categories: accepting the inevitability of death; reconciling one’s feelings to avoid the fear of death; and living life to the fullest, up to the end.
