The Fear Of Death In Virginia Woolf's The Death Of The Moth

In her essay, On the Fear of Death, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross discusses the “changes that have taken place in the last few decades, changes that are ultimately responsible for the increased fear of death...” (On the Fear of Death, Page 2). Furthermore, Kubler-Ross emphasizes this increased fear, with the discussion of the treatment for the severely ill. Kubler-Ross claims that severely ill patients are “often treated like a person with no right to opinion,” and that “it would take so little to remember that the sick person too has feelings, has wishes and opinions, and has...the right to be heard” (On the Fear of Death, Page 4). It is with this claim that Kubler-Ross overlays the continuing problem of avoidance and objectivity of the severely

Illustrated in her essay, The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf discusses the point in time when she realizes that death is indeed inevitable. As the moth began to perish, Woolf claimed “...against the oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew had any chance against death” (The Death of the Moth, Page, 2). With this statement, Woolf signifies that death is inevitable, that it cannot be stopped, that it cannot be cured, only slowed. It is this thought that most contributes to the act of avoidance and objectivity on the severely ill. More importantly, with her scenario, Woolf avoids agitating it, she attempts to help but immediately stops herself, “as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again” (On the Death of the Moth, Page 2). If a patient is terminally ill, what should keep an individual from avoiding him and objectifying him, if he knows his death is