There is nothing wasteful about striving to have a ‘good’ death

Matt Hancock’s voice went a bit wobbly, and his face assumed the determined stiffness that denotes the build-up of tears, as he announced his new “right to say goodbye”. The Health Secretary wants care homes to introduce more flexible procedures so that people dying of coronavirus can be visited by their families.

“Wanting to be with someone you love at the end of their life is one of the deepest human instincts,” said Hancock, with an eloquence that sounded like it came from experience. “And it’s a moment that will be with you forever.”

It’s bizarre, really, that we have got this far into a deadly pandemic with so little discussion about how to make each death more tolerable – both for the dying and for those they leave behind.

All the talk is of preventing deaths – or, more accurately, spacing them out so that the NHS doesn’t become overwhelmed. That distinction is important, because we so often forget – we strive to forget – that death cannot be prevented. It is coming for us all. And the manner of your death may turn out to be just as important as the timing.

Although there have been some tragically young victims of Covid-19, the virus mostly kills people for whom the end is already on the horizon. Precise figures for the UK are hard to find, but in Italy the average age of those who have died from Covid-19 is 79.5. This means the virus has stolen an estimated three years of life from the Italian population.

Each one of those years is precious and worth fighting for. The lives of old people matter. But so do their deaths. And no one wants to die cut off from the people they love.

The deathbed stories emerging from care homes and hospitals are desperate. Fear of contagion means that loved ones have had to shout their goodbyes through bedroom windows. Nurses and carers – themselves heavily armoured in PPE and unable to offer the comfort of touch – have found themselves holding up smartphones for Facetime farewells or reading aloud declarations of love that should have been whispered with kisses. In one care home, staff wafted a bottle of perfume under the nose of a dying man to conjure the smell of his exiled wife.

Meanwhile – and not coincidentally – A&E departments report a sharp rise in people dying at home because they are leaving it too late to call 999. People don’t want to go anywhere near a hospital at the moment – partly because they don’t want to catch the virus or add to the NHS workload, but also, surely, because they would rather die messily at home than in sterile isolation.

It is possible to manage coronavirus deaths more compassionately. I read this week about one care home that is going to heroic lengths to give its residents a good death, even moving family members into their bedrooms to help care for them. But the manager of the home said she’d had complaints from the public and from health officials. “One complaint, for example, was that it was a waste of PPE.”

A waste? My God, what foolishness. Life is not the only thing worth fighting for. All of us will die in the end, and all of us will crave a familiar hand to hold when we do. For those left behind, too, there is lasting comfort in knowing that you accompanied the dying right to the edge of the abyss.

There is nothing wasteful about striving for a “good” death. It is humanity at its most humane.