Sublime

If you are facing your own death, and have the clarity of mind and opportunity to make such choices, then realise that for you to own your death, to author it and to shape it, is tremendously important. You are the protagonist and the author. If you do not insist on this central role, you may find yourself reduced to a mere cameo. Others, stronger

Robert has gone to Our House, an AIDS hospice. He seems very happy there and continues to manifest a steady change of attitude. At this very moment, I am looking at an advance directive, a document that states that Robert has chosen me to make medical decisions for him when he is unable to make them for himself. This is a humbling experience, and I

What is death? A loss, a disappearance, a letting go, a saying good-bye. When you cling you refuse to let go, you refuse to say good-bye, you resist death. And even though you may not realize it, that is when you resist life too.

How it happened is impossible to say—because it happened step by step, imperceptibly—but in the third month of Ivan Ilych’s illness his wife, and daughter, and his son also, the servants, his acquaintances, his doctors, and, most of all, he himself, came to realize that all the interest other people had in him was based solely on the fact that he w

We don’t live with death as a companion, and so we fear it as an unwelcome, unbidden outsider when it comes. Without the cultural rituals in place to give death some form of meaning, and therefore to confer to the end of life a sense of closure (rather than simply see it curtailed absurdly and painfully), it is down to us to each identify and compl

Even though death is inevitable, and frequently occurs around us, it’s astonishing we don’t speak more openly about it. There’s so much death can teach us about life. Death has many gifts. It can help us discover the best of ourselves.

Je prends très au sérieux l’idée que si vous vivez content et sans trop de regrets, vous affronterez la mort avec plus de sérénité. C’est une leçon que m’ont donnée nombre de patients proches de la mort, ainsi que des écrivains tels que Tolstoï, qui permet à Ivan Ilitch de comprendre que s’il meurt si mal, c’est parce qu’il a mal vécu. Vivre de faç

That’s what happens when you’re told that death is around the corner: you change, life doesn’t change.

At a seminar on death and dying guided by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a twenty-eight-year-old nurse and mother of four was dying of cancer. She had been through eleven operations, and she asked those of us in attendance, “How would you feel if you came into a hospital room to visit a twenty-eight-year-old mother dying of cancer?” The answers called out