There are several ways in which one can classify death. Death is not solely viewed as being physiological; it too can be viewed as being spiritual, emotional, as well as psychological. Spiritual death is the cessation of all vital phenomena without capability of resuscitation. Emotional death is "emotions relevant to our understanding of the death of others: the emotions of horror and grief"(220), or when an individual lets their emotions overcome them mentally, disabling them to further function normally.
Psychological death is a more severe stage of emotional death that makes an individual suffering from it make poor illogical decisions. People that view death as multiple entities utilize divergent thinking, which enables them to see not only the detriment, but also the benefit of death. Toni Morrison in her novel titled Sula uses death as a reoccurring theme, which essentially allots the reader to use divergent rather than convergent thinking. The role of death in Sula is experienced using the aspects of killing, suicide, and accidents. .
In reading Sula, it might be inferred that some characters choose death over life. For an individual to choose death over .
life, they must be suffering from stages of dying which consist of.
the five emotional and behavioral stages that may occur after a person first learns of approaching death. The stages, identified and described by .
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, are denial and shock, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The stages may occur in sequence or they may recur, as the person moves forward and backward--especially among denial, anger, and bargaining (Kubler-Ross 83).
When an individual is experiencing one or more of the stages of dying, they tend to focus on a large amount of negative thoughts and periodically show it with their actions and decisions. An individual's vitality is the characteristic, principle, or force that distinguishes living things from nonliving things.