Death and Chocolate

After this week of celebrity deaths (Dolly Parton, Tim Curry, Yayoi Kusama, Peter Cullen, etc.), I feel compelled to write a little bit about dying.

There’s a lot of ethics principles and dilemmas when it comes to death and medicine: organ donors, physician-assisted suicide, and DNRs, for starters. A doctor’s job is to ensure that a patient’s health (and therefore life) can be at its very best, so the line between administering care and pivoting to making the patient comfortable so that they can (as painlessly as possible) pass is a little gray. I imagine working in hospice must be very emotionally draining, as all the patients you get to know are all (sooner rather than later) going to die. 

I just finished reading Atonement by Ian McEwan. It’s set in England during WWII and is told from multiple povs. Towards the end, one of the main characters is caring for wounded soldiers who just returned from fighting in France. The ward sister told her to hold the hand of and talk in French to one of the French soldiers. As she converses with the young, 18 year old soldier, she not only finds that he has a fatal head injury, but also that he thinks that she is fiance. While she originally tried to correct him, she eventually realized that the ward sister’s real purpose for sending her was to help him peacefully into his final moments. He was far from his country and his family, and speaking to her in his native tongue would allow him to have closure before he passed.

It's sometimes too late to save the body (that pains me, as I stubbornly approach most of my problems and challenges with unrelenting persistence not to give up). However, this passage demonstrated that care does not end with the physical body. After all, a patient is a person, not just a case.

One last thought before I finish this entry – I titled this Death and Chocolate after the first chapter of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. The Book Thief is told from the perspective of death. It’s also set in WWI, but instead in Germany. At the end, death commented that humans haunt them (pronouns for death were never used, which makes sense as death is more of an entity than a thing), as it is almost unfathomable how humans are capable of both extremes of cruelty and compassion.