[CCIP]

Thanks for this! These are very accurate observations in my experience (and although I'm not a medic, I've encountered end-of-life care issues in a whole bunch of different capacities). My only wish is that both the patients and families have the right kind of professional help on hand when all this happens, regardless of type and regardless of scenario. Death is an awful thing for everyone involved, but I think it's still possible to do a better job for everyone involved.

The tough thing too is that although you can definitely split things into types and find ways to work with them, sometimes life still throws a cog in the wheel. Probably the worst experience of my entire life was losing my grandmother, who was a mother figure to me and was well on her way to becoming a Type 3 patient with her Alzheimer's as per your classification - and then one day, was murdered in a botched robbery. I can't speak for the rest of my family, but for me, that was mentally so destructive that nearly 8 years later, I'm still not really over it - sadly, the way human minds work is tricky and in some ways it's much easier to accept losing a loved one than to have your whole world turned upside down to the point where nothing makes sense anymore. Often, those two things are one and the same; but other times, it's not the loss itself but the inability to cope with it that does it. Which is why I really do wish for families to always have the right support on hand.

On the other hand, if I take my grandfather - he was the sort of guy that everybody thought would be healthy as a bull and active for his entire life, until one day he'd just drop dead on the spot. He was a village boy, handyman, fisherman, gardener, you name it - and he did all these things well into his 80s, along with eating one of the worst diets I've seen a man eat and drinking like a real Russian (i.e. plenty of straight vodka). In his last year, he'd finally started declining and wasn't able to do all that he wanted, and his doctors were mostly focused on his cardiovascular health - he had a mild arrhythmia and other issues that pointed to his heart being at risk of giving out - and as a result, they missed the real killer. Then one day he just stopped eating, and two weeks later he was gone. He didn't want to go, he was not really the Type 2 in your classification - his mind, which was still really sharp, said no - but his body said it was time, and he just couldn't eat anymore. He couldn't even explain it, he kept repeating that he didn't want to die and that he wanted to go see his garden and fix the summer house, and then one night he just died in his sleep. As it turned out, what got him was an undiagnosed terminal stomach cancer that the doctors missed while focusing on his heart problems. In some ways, I think he was probably really lucky not to have it diagnosed - the treatment probably would've been worse on him and the family than the disease, and even if he had a few more months he would not have been spending them gardening and fishing and fixing the house like he wanted to anyway. So although he was not the classic Type 2, I think both he and the family were, in a lot of ways, fortunate. He wasn't the kind of man who knew how to be ill, and the family were already mentally prepared for something to suddenly take him one day, not a long illness. It felt, in a strange way, really good for a change to just be able to have a good cry, remember the good times, and move on.

End-of-life stuff is tough no matter where you come from, but there's certainly lots to learn about and lots of things that I think people can do to better be prepared!