How America Weaponizes the Dying Process
America doesn’t let you die. It holds you in place. It codes your decline into billing systems. It wraps your suffering in legal jargon and repackages your family as both caregiver and combatant.
This isn’t healthcare. It’s wealth extraction.
As my father-in-law spends his final days in hospice care, I’ve watched up close how the American death system operates. It is not designed for comfort. It is designed for profit, liability management, and the offloading of responsibility. Dying in America is no longer a personal or family event. It’s a financial transaction wrapped in emotional chaos.
The Family Is the Front Line of the Grift
When death approaches, unresolved trauma takes the wheel. Every sibling becomes a strategist. Every decision becomes a referendum on your worth in the family. Who controls the meds. Who decides whether Dad gets morphine. Who holds the DNR. It becomes a war of narcissistic injuries dressed up as caregiving.
Power of attorney? That’s not a fiduciary position in families like ours. It’s an enmeshment weapon. It’s a way to control. To withhold. To punish. And ultimately, to reposition yourself in the hierarchy of who gets what.
Families with unresolved trauma do not know how to manage power. They do not know how to make unified decisions. So when systems like hospice or palliative care ask for one person to take charge, they create a power imbalance that escalates into psychological warfare.
Legal Tools Turned Against the Dying
Power of attorney. Advanced directives. Living wills. These are tools meant to protect dignity and autonomy. But in reality, they often become mechanisms for psychological control.
The power of attorney often overrides the wishes of the dying person. Family members may resuscitate despite clear DNR preferences. They may deny morphine. They may prolong suffering in order to delay grief or manage money. Some want the body alive long enough to execute a transaction. Some want to punish the dying parent for emotional pain they never resolved. Either way, the person dying has little say once the paperwork is activated.
This isn’t love. This is narcissism with a notary stamp.
First-Generation Families Are Set Up to Fail
Migrant families are particularly vulnerable. We’re handed these tools—wills, trusts, directives—as if we’ve been practicing estate planning for centuries. We haven’t. We adopted these systems secondhand, often from white-collar advisors who don’t understand our family structures or trauma histories.
We end up applying Western legal frameworks to deeply enmeshed, emotionally fractured family units. The result is weaponized paperwork. Trusts become battlegrounds. POAs become psychological daggers. In families without boundaries, these tools accelerate collapse.
Hospice and the Ethics Shell Game
Hospice workers and social workers hide behind forms. They defer to the POA. They follow protocols that prioritize liability over care. No one wants to be the one who “let them die,” so people are kept alive through protocol even when they are begging for rest.
The social worker isn’t protecting the patient. They are protecting the agency. They are trained to manage risk, not to resolve family trauma. They use coded language and clinical neutrality to avoid accountability. “It’s not up to us.” “We follow the directive.” “The family holds the authority.” Behind every phrase is an institution offloading moral responsibility.
The Death Industry Is the Final American Grift
From life insurance upsells to skilled nursing bills to burial plot markups, the dying process is a business model. It feeds on silence, shame, and division. Families get played against each other. Doctors bill until the last breath. Everyone takes their cut.
People don’t talk to their cousins after the funeral. Siblings go no-contact. The matriarch or patriarch dies, and with them goes the last shred of unity.
This is not a cultural failure. It’s a systemic outcome. The system was built this way.
The Somatic Receipts of a Bad Life
We don’t just die. We accumulate interest on decades of cowardice, avoidance, and emotional fusion. Parkinson’s. COPD. Colon cancer. These are not always genetic. They are sometimes the physical receipts for lives of silence, repression, and emotional fraud.
When we see our elders withering, we are watching the unpaid balance of their psychology. And if we are not careful, we will inherit their diseases in different forms—anxiety, rage, addiction, autoimmune disorders.
What You Must Do
If you are Gen X or a first-generation adult watching your parents die, you need to do the following:
Re-read every POA and advanced directive in your family. Know who holds power and what it means.
Refuse to be your family’s doctor, lawyer, or therapist. Get professionals. Step back.
Observe the dynamics without enmeshment. Your job is to witness, not to rescue.
Prepare your own death plan. Choose clarity over chaos.
Educate your kids with transparency. Dignity is modeled, not inherited.
We say we’re honoring the dying. But we’re often reenacting unresolved trauma and calling it love.
Stop saying you’re doing this “for them” if you won’t even ask what they want.
And if you’re using someone’s final moments to re-regulate your own emotional pain, you’re not a caregiver. You’re part of the problem.
You want peace at the end? Then stop outsourcing your boundaries to paperwork. Stop weaponizing your trauma with legal documents. Stop pretending this is about love when it’s about control.
Real freedom is dying on your own terms.
Real dignity is telling your kids the truth.
And real care is stepping aside when your ego wants to take the lead.
For more, subscribe to Narcissism Nation on YouTube or contact Enrique at enrique@elevateepo.com to begin the PrecisionCycle recalibration.