Ars Morendi.

December 12, 2013 12:47 PM

“I am going to put you on a bit of morphine,” I said, like I was used to saying such things, announcing to dying patients that I was going to put them on a drug named for Morpheus, the god of sleep, descended from Thanatos, the god of death." A doctor reflects on the art of dying in 21st century America.
posted by sonika (7 comments total)

I was enjoying the article until I came upon this sentence:
"Seeing the buzzing around Jane lying prostate in bed,"

Jane and her prostate, in bed. Boggles the mind, it does.
posted by Floydd at 1:20 PM on December 12, 2013 [2 favorites]

No, she's lying about having a prostate.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:34 PM on December 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

My paternal grandfather was similarly stubborn when it came to wanting to stay home and not get hospitalized. There wasn't any urgent need to get him to a hospital, no sudden downturn - the only time hospitalizing him ever came up was when he was in his mid-80's, and he experienced sudden blackouts. My father and the doctors discussed putting him in a home and made those arrangements. But on the day the doctors were going to move him to the new home, Grandpa apparently locked his arms around the bedpost and refused to move. They called my father after an hour and asked him to come help; Dad walked in, looked at my grandfather stubbornly hanging onto the bed and the nurses pleading with him to relent, and then he kicked everyone out of the room and made Grandpa a deal - Grandpa could stay in his own home if he agreed to letting a couple people check on him every day, and if he got one of those Life Alert things. Deal?

Deal. They let Grandpa go home, and a neighbor stopped in every morning from then on to get him breakfast and make sure he cleaned up in the morning, and my dad stopped in every day at lunch and then every evening on the way home from work. And things went on like that for 3 years.

And then, one morning when he was 88, my grandfather got up and went down to the kitchen to wait for the neighbor to come make him breakfast. Often, he'd wake up before she got there and go sit at the kitchen table to wait for her, and sometimes he'd even doze off while he waited. Usually, when she called a hello, he'd wake up.

But this one morning, when she came in and saw him slouched at the table, where he'd sat to wait for her, and she called "good morning"....he didn't wake up this time. Or ever.

To this day I think this is one of the more graceful deaths I've ever heard of - slipping away while sitting in your chair on an ordinary morning, nodding off while you're waiting for breakfast.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:43 PM on December 12, 2013 [34 favorites]

My father in law, in gentle decline over the last 6-8 years and into his eighties, died gently in his sleep, in his best pyjamas, holding his wife's hand.

In the house he'd lived in for the last 40 years, within view of his church and the school where he lived for most of his childhood.

Then when he had his funeral, this man who I got used to knowing as a gentle old man, mostly reading the paper in the garden in recent years, had a full capacity funeral in the cathedral where all the people from years past as an athlete, paediatrician, member of the community, somehow all turned up despite these recent years of quiet in the garden.

I feel that this is the gold standard of a good death, and it really is something to aim for as much as a good life.
posted by C.A.S. at 2:41 PM on December 12, 2013 [8 favorites]

What made Jane's a Good Death?

Money.

Or that's what it sounds like. She had a maid taking care of the house, her room, her personal needs. Several doctors on call who spent a lot of time at the house. A large comfortable bed with tassels and damask linen. A view of Central Park.

I'm happy for her that she had these comforts that probably made dying easier. But it feels like the author didn't really reflect on this aspect of it very much.
posted by lollusc at 3:38 PM on December 12, 2013 [8 favorites]

Did she just invent hospice?

(Which is not, unlike she claims, "an end-of-life, medical clean-up crew".)
posted by MeiraV at 7:13 PM on December 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Previously on the blue: How Doctors Die.

In that context, this is interesting to me:

It was clear to me that Jane and I were holding people up. Everyone had places to go, things to do. No one had time to sit around waiting, especially waiting for someone to die.

It's fairly clear from historical accounts that "deathbeds" often took some time, and there's now a degree of impatience in certain cultures about such things: either something medical should be being done (to stop it, or surreptitiously hurry it along) or it should be within the approved zone of hospice.
posted by holgate at 7:58 PM on December 12, 2013 [1 favorite]