Medical boundaries & life
An elderly neighbour passed away, recently. Of the many things we had in the long to-do list of Sunday that comes just once a week, we kept pushing the unpleasant task of paying them a visit for a while before we took the plunge and knocked on their door.
The relatives wore a demeanour of sadness, and despite the initial uneasiness it did not require us to say much. They provided a vivid account of his ailments, sufferings and treatments that they had supported him through over the last months.
The discussion did take that all too familiar bend for a brief while: of when and how the doctor or hospital could have done that instead of this. I’m not too sure whether this piece was because they knew of me to be doctor.
When I refrained from getting sucked into a medical discussion, but politely asked his age (it was 82), how long he had been ailing (2 years) and what contributions and pleasant memories we had of him, the conversation bounced enthusiastically back to seeing death as an inevitable end to a glorious chapter of this gentleman’s life and contributions.
The wife and son remarked how he had lived a full life, how his body had turned frail over the last 2 years when he had been in much and frequent pain, and how the curtain had to fall one day, one way or the other, on the day it did or perhaps on another day.
Despite our priding ourselves as being “knowledgeable”, our acceptance that death as an inevitable “natural” aspect of life is still rather poor. We have learnt to see it through a prism of reason. One cannot just die of old age, frail health or the with body “giving up” after eight decades of relentless service.
The legal definition of death is that the heart should have stopped irreversibly; we therefore need a respectable biomedical label such as cardiac failure, to convey that the heart indeed failed and stopped beating.
Every journey (by car, train or air) has to come to an end, so does life’s journey need to end sometime in death. It is more often than not a natural event, and learning to accept it makes life graceful and richer!