Legacy Matters

Dancing with Death

This week's  Grand Rounds is hosted by Maria, an intern in a psychiatry residency program who publishes the blog Intueri, from the Latin, meaning to contemplate and in her case to contemplate musings, miracles, medicine and madness.  There I found Dr. Bob who writes about Dancing with Death in an eloquent and moving post.

A curious dance of denial often ensues between physician and family, as each, unwilling to face the unpleasantness of the inevitable, avoids the topic at all costs. The physician hides behind intellect, speaking of blood counts, medications, and ventilators, or at best tiptoeing around the core issue with sterile terms like "prognosis." Family members hesitate to ask questions whose answers they already know. Too rarely are the physician and family willing to place the subject squarely on the table, in all its ugliness and fearfulness. Decisions which need to be made are put off, unspoken and deferred. The clock ticks on, the meter is running, and only the outcome is not in doubt. 

Our discomfort with death is our confusion about life. Man is the only species cognizant of his coming demise -- who then, in the ultimate paradox, lives his entire life pretending it will not happen. Our Western culture, enriched with a wealth of distractions, allows us to pass our living years without preparing for the inevitable. When the time arrives, we use all the weapons at our disposal -- wealth, technology, information, law -- to resist the dragon. We drive it back for a time -- at enormous cost, personal, financial, physical and emotional. Death always wins -- always

This is so true.  Why people don't prepare for the inevitable, especially if they have young children or are in their middle age continues to surprise me.

We must learn how to die. And to learn how to die, we must learn how to live -- how to seek the transcendent, the power of love, and sacrifice, and giving which makes life rich and enduring. The selfish, the superficial, the transient all gratify for a time, but when this is all we possess, we grasp desperately to their threadbare fabric when beauty and health give way to weakness, fear and death. All great religions understand this: the meaning of life transcends life. In the Judeo-Christian view, life is an opportunity to draw ourselves and others closer to the light and goodness of God, with the promise of an even greater life and deeper relationship after death. Yet even for the agnostic or secular among us, service to others -- personal and social -- has the potential to endure long after us. None of us will be remembered for our desperate clinging to life in its waning days, but rather for the lives we touched, the world we made better when we lived.

I believe that the best way to live a full and deep life is to realize that death can come at any moment. Posted by Jill Fallon at March 3, 2005 2:57 PM | Permalink