APPROPRIATE DEATH

    Thanatology defines an appropriate death as one arrived at with minimal social and emotional impoverishment and suffering,  characterized by the preservation or restoration of important relationships and the resolution of residual conflicts.

   For the most appropriate death for the Navajo, it is necessary to establish your life to achieve diving; psycho-physical knowledge-power, which only the holy being obtains, "The mark of possibly having achieved the state of a holy being is death by old age-death without bad thoughts, words, or actions. Life extension and the will to live are strange and stressful bedfellows.  In the West, death is seen as failure; the failure to survive as a person, the failure to heal as a medical professional, and the failure of science and its technological aids.

    Chaney (1988) advises that death by suicide only assures that the soul (in the majority of cases) must reincarnate to fulfill karmic obligations that it attempted to escape.
Eadie (1992), a near-death survivor states:
   
    We must never consider suicide.  This act will only
    cause us to lose opportunities for further
    development while here on earth...Despair is never
    justified, because  it is never needed. We are here to
    learn, to experiment, to make mistakes...But as we grow
    and seek the positive all around us, even the laws
    themselves will be revealed. We will be given all that
    we are prepared to receive.

    Concern for the spirit was also tied to a proper burial, for it was believed that the dead would be restless if  prevented from joining the Creator (as may occur if one commits suicide).  However, some of the aged, particularly women, of the Ibo and Semi-Bantu African tribes of Southern Nigeria, might commit suicide if they possessed enough wealth for an appropriate burial, especially if there was an only son who might not be able to take care of the mother's burial properly.  Wallace Black Elk addresses the Lakota belief of suicide, the loss and return of the spirit, and the forgiveness of the Creator, "we ask Tunkishila to forgive that man who took his life.  Then Tunkishila will forgive that man and bring his spirit back to him.

    Native and African Americans believe that humiliation, suffering, and rejection was a thing to be reconciled and by its defeat showed others courage, advanced the faith of the people, and that suicide was not an option, overall.  The will to live is an expression of hope coupled with an active belief that obstacles and impediments can be either changed for the better or conquered.

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