We Are All Dying
We are all dying.
Call it “the natural order” or call it entropy; it doesn’t matter. Eventually, we all will die.
Is it bold to make that statement? To say out loud a most uncomfortable truth: that the end is inevitably coming? The twentieth century with its wondrous technologies and patent cures has provided us with every conceivable method of escaping death. From the daily vitamin, to CPR, to vaccines, hyperbolic chambers, and interventional surgery the modern world is ever contriving ways to avoid death. While we blunder on the path to failed immortality we find ourselves increasingly willing to reject the most fundamental of natural processes. Death, which once was widely accepted, spoke of, and examined in the light, is now shrouded in a tomb of dark denial.
People morn in private. They huddle in shallow groups ashamed of their pain and fearful of their emotions. Our culture no longer prepares people for the end, but instead offers a myriad of ways to attempt to circumvent it. At some point in our history we lost our connection with death. We lost our understanding.
It could have come with the industrial revolution. As people ventured further and further from their families in search of work they lost their connection to the rights and rituals they once had. It could have come with the embracing of modern medicine. Medicine as we now know it denies death as a natural occurrence. Instead, it pursues a never ending stream of treatments in an effort to thwart death. It concedes to death only as the last possible alternative. The disconnection could be due to our ever growing dependence on technology. It could be that our reliance on machines to perform our daily duties, convey our communications, and solve our problems has taken from us a small sliver of our humanity. Or maybe, it is just a matter of shear economics. The family unit, now needing more than one income to survive, can no longer afford to attend to the dying. The dying, creating a time burden on the family unit, must now be sent away for care.
What ever the reason, a cultural shift in attitude has lead to a change in the manner in which we die. It is more common for a man to die within the sterile white walls of a hospital room than it is for him to die warm and safe in his bed at home. Families, no longer equipped to deal with the medical, spiritual, and emotional needs of their loved ones feel that they are forced to hand over their burdens to trained medical professionals. Less than one hundred years ago, such a thing would not have been heard of. A person would be attended to in their final hours in the comfort of their homes. We have lost the ability to realize death, suffering, and pain as valid aspects of existence. We have circled our arms around the concept that a person willing to die at the end of their life is somehow deviant. We have decided, as a culture, to pursue any means necessary to avoid death even if it means spending our last moments utterly alone.
Society now feels the strain of this cultural shift. Medical costs to attend to the terminally ill in a hospital setting attribute a great strain to an already overtaxed health care system. Families, having no financial way to provide end of life care for their loved ones, find themselves in difficult economic situations. The elderly, ill, and dying find themselves “disposed of.” Having served their usefulness to society they die surrounded by strangers and machines, away from all things personal and comforting; without dignity. And overwhelming guilt wraps around the hearts of many individuals who feel that they were forced by circumstance to abandon their ailing kin to the cold hands of medicine.
At some point medical science has to give way to the inevitable. It must entertain and accept the fact that it can not deny death indefinitely. Hospitals, doctors, nurses all must work toward improving the quality, not the quantity of life. Patients, family, and the population as a whole must be re-educated in the realities of death. They must be given resources that help them cope with loss. Death must be taken from behind the curtain and exposed for the ordinary occurrence that it is. People must understand their options both to receive medical care and pain management in their final hours and their option to let go when the time is right.
Every person should discuss their wishes with those nearest and dearest to them. Whether it is to die with hospice care at home or to be at the hospital towards the end; these matters should be discussed while a person is still able to make their opinions known. Death should be an accepted topic of conversation in the home. Reserving the topic of death till a death has occurred does not help develop the emotional tools needed to deal with loss. Talking with others about family members that have passed on is not only an excellent way of paying tribute to their memories, but is a wonderful way to expose underlying fears and concerns. Parents should strive to instill a healthy attitude about death and dying in their children. Children should not be dissuaded from discussing death and should not be told to avoid “morbid” subject material. Physicians should be brought into the discussion and should be used as a resource for better understanding.
In the end it is our attitude about death that has to change. We can accept that death is a meaningful part of life and decide to die under the terms we define or we can continue to deny death and spend our final moments alive in pursuit of defying it.
