Harve E. Rawson

Dying in Egypt: a Remarkable Tale of Death and Its Complexities Harve E. Rawson

DYING IN EGYPT: A REMARKABLE TALE OF DEATH AND ITS COMPLEXITIES is a story of what every traveler most dreads - getting sick and dying in an alien land where no one speaks your language, both the culture and the religion is different than your own, and you know no one. It is also a story about the devastating grief that occurs when you lose someone you truly love. But most importantly, it is a story about coping with that devastation and slowly learning how to live a meaningful life without diminishing your loss. The tale involves a perfectly health 70-year-old going on a world tour who suddenly falls ill on her way to Egypt and 11 days later is dead, six of those days in a coma. During that time, her husband tries to cope with a different culture, a different religion and a different medical system. Upon his wife's death, he has to cope with the huge complexities of getting her body back to the United States, coming to terms with his overwhelming grief, and slowly learning that life goes on. DYING IN EGYPT was written to help future travelers cope if disaster should strike them in a foreign land; it was written to help all those who suffer severe loss to learn how to deal with the emotional storm that tends to overcome you; it was written to suggest survival is possible if you don't just give up. Finally it reviews various cultural attitudes toward death and its survivors; various religious perspectives on death and surviving; and a few insights modern psychology may offer in this area.