Death is not a so sad event? It is!

All we will die some day. It is the destiny of the human being.

And death has been a subject to be feared since the modern society was established. We believe that death is inevitable, but want to survive as far as possible.

Many people believe that we will be in full of fear at the end of life. But researchers at the University of North Carolina claim it is not true. People near to death feel happy, according to them.

Independent: Dying people are surprisingly happy about it, study finds

In this study above, the researchers found approximately a total of 600 blog posts written by patients near to death by cancer or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. They examined the contents of each entry. For comparison, they recruited healthy volunteers, to ask them to write a blog with imagining that they are near to death. As a result, people near to death in real were considered to have made more positive ideas than healthy people.

Therefore, this result suggests that death is not necessarily a horrible or hopeless event, according to the author. If so, it will be relieving for people with diseases hard to treat. However, how is the validity of this study? In my opinion, this result is far from reliable, unfortunately.

First of all, the materials of this study are blog entries written by people with illnesses. There is possible room for selection bias in the methodology of this study. People who are willing to write a blog tend to intend to have a positive impact on the readers. Thus, they can pretend their mood and feel as glad and happy rather than sad and fearful. In addition, depressed people cannot write a blog, in general. Patients in severe medical condition are hardly able to write things, either.

I have seen studies which treated similar themes of this one. And the researchers did a face-to-face interview with the patients. A direct conversation represents the emotion of the subjects more precisely than the blog entries. Nonetheless, patients in a serious state could reject the interview.

Even considering the value of this study, I hesitate to trust the claim of the authors of this study. Death is still an arc enemy of human.