With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial

by Kathryn Mannix

This triggered a behaviour change that saw the sickest people being rushed into hospital for treatment instead of waiting at home to die. Life expectancies increased; many lives were enhanced and lengthened. Yet these welcome healthcare advances can only remediate us up to a point; beyond the point of saving us to live ‘well enough’ there is a point of futility. Here, technology is deployed in a new deathbed ritual that is a triumph of denial over experience.

What is different is that we have lost the familiarity we once had with that process, and we have lost the vocabulary and etiquette that served us so well in past times, when death was acknowledged to be inevitable. Instead of dying in a dear and familiar room with people we love around us, we now die in ambulances and emergency rooms and intensive care units, our loved ones separated from us by the machinery of life preservation.

Sadly, wise ‘midwives’ to talk us through the dying process are scarce: in modern healthcare, fewer doctors and nurses have opportunity to witness normal, uncomplicated dying as their practice increasingly entangles technology with terminal care.

There are only two days with fewer than twenty-four hours in each lifetime, sitting like bookends astride our lives: one is celebrated every year, yet it is the other that makes us see living as precious.

‘Have you noticed that she stops breathing from time to time? That tells me that she is unconscious, very deeply relaxed… This is what the very end of life is like. Just very quiet and peaceful. I don’t expect she will wake up again now. She is very comfortable and peaceful.’