Journey Home

Death trails our lives as surely as night follows day, but many of us still feel shocked when the news comes that we or a loved one has a life-ending ailment.

The removal of death and dying from our homes and families is eroding our affinity and kinship to events that have been seminal to culture since the dawn of humanity.

Many of us are living long enough to become interested in adding vitality, meaning and life to our years rather than merely adding more years to life.

Our desire to live longer, even at the end of life, has driven a multitude of ways of averting death. Yet people who accept their prognosis and who choose palliative care are happier and live longer than those who pursue life-extending therapies.

Some diseases have a better prognosis than others but when the odds of survival are slim, health professionals can feel pressured to offer further treatments despite their low chances of success.

Patients who receive new treatments in clinical trials do little better than those on existing therapies.

Being diagnosed with a life-ending illness often evokes a desire for answers and solutions that nobody can provide. But embracing uncertainty can be a midwife to personhood and the arts of living and dying well.

Faced with a choice between death, or chronic poor health, and the tantalising prospect of a cure, few of us can resist choosing more treatment. But the experience of many who choose new drugs and medical interventions isn’t what they imagined.

Few of us want to admit our age in a Botox culture where it’s a compliment to be told we look youthful. This might be a clue as to why it’s difficult to talk about ageing and advancing frailty as inescapable facts of life.

Some health professionals encourage hope when they speak to a terminally ill person about their prognosis and end-of-life care. But investing in perpetual hope means dying people may never learn how to die.

The secret theology of our rational, secular age is that death ends relationships and reciprocity. But consigning our dead to the gone-ness of the past has far-reaching consequences.

Each of us is called to particular work, according to our biography and talents and circumstances. Answering that call is to lay claim to our deepest truth and our kinship to each other.

Despite assurances from doctors who say they can mitigate the pain of disease and the decline of a failing body, nobody should plan on pain-free living or dying.

Mindfulness means being aware of what’s happening in the present. It’s a way of coming home to ourselves that deepens our understanding and ends suffering.

People who have practical conversations with doctors about their preferences for their end-of-life care are more likely to die a ‘good death’ while sparing their families a lot of preventable heartache and distress.

Competence is a highly valued quality in our culture. But our store of knowledge and well-honed competencies don’t serve us so well in human affairs or the messy business of dying.

People living with chronic or terminal conditions have a host of reasons for wanting to die before death claims them.

Some older people are waking up to their elderhood, but if the vanishing of our elders is any measure, it’s a rare epiphany.

Dying doesn’t have to mean foreclosure or that our last days need to be congested by regrets, or unspoken words and unrequited feelings.

Dying is a series of destructive events that by its nature strips our humanity and obliterates our hopes for dying with dignity.

What becomes of our body when we die needn’t preoccupy us but we can ease the burden on loved ones by letting them know what to do with our corpse.

The art of dying is the art of living.