In my experience, the romantic expectation of a good death places an immense and unnecessary burden on the dying. We may view it as a failure when people don’t go calmly into the night. “Oh, my mother didn’t see tunnels of light. She died terrified. It was an awful death,” I once heard a man complain. Many people feel like failures simply for dying in the first place because our culture is so steeped in the language of “fighting until the end.” Why should we further weigh the dying person down by judging how they go? As Crystal discovered, allowing our loved ones to have the experiences they
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