The family of the person facing death may go through the mourning cycle prematurely and write the dying person off before they are dead. Thereafter, they react in a cold and distant fashion because they do not want to reopen a painful chapter that in their minds has been closed. If you see this development, you should caution relatives against burying the patient while he is still alive because this person needs their emotional support to the end. Often relatives when faced with the impending death of a loved one will pretend it is not happening. This denial that a loved one is dying is hard to deal with, but it is important to try because of the immense burden of guilt the survivor will feel later.
Friends react in the same way.
Rather than risking saying the wrong thing, many friends fail to visit and when they do, can say little or nothing. There are then long silences between old friends and loved ones punctuated by nervous banalities. None of us has been taught what to say to a dying person or how to confront death. By just 'being there', listening to what a dying person is saying we learn much about death and dying. We learn that each person and each death is unique.