Death. Mortality. End of Life. Something inevitable, yet rarely discussed and a source of intense discomfort for most. When mentioned, it is considered inauspicious and rude in many cultures. Death is an integral part of the workday for a Critical Care Physician like me. But it was never a topic of discussion in Medical School or training.
Most view dementia as a person leaving them. But they’re not. They’re evolving into a new person, similar but not exact. Their capacity to perform tasks and retain memory of recent events doesn’t disqualify them from continuing to be loved and treated with dignity and respect, especially when the end is near.
It’s time that we revise and refine our cultural lexicon around this emergent end-of-life practice. A medically assisted death definitively warrants a linguistic and conceptual category of its own.
It’s important to have age-appropriate dialogue with children about death.
It is primarily through having places to “story” that people have the opportunity to try to make sense of the senseless, to embrace what needs to be embraced, and to reveal that the human spirit prevails.
The day I became a widow was the day I began my desperate attempt to crawl toward any sliver of light after my life shattered into a million pieces.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
If love is not a disorder, illness, or diagnosis, then neither is grief.
Given the fact of our mortality, whether we want it or not, aren’t we all members of a Date with Death Club?
