By BJ Miller, Shoshana Berger — 2019
Prognoses are more of an art than a science. Maybe it’s better not to know.
Read on www.nytimes.com
CLEAR ALL
In most modern cultures, it’s common for people to feel uneasy about death. We express this discomfort by avoiding conversations on the topic and lowering our voices when speaking of the dead and dying.
My Feb. 5 column, “A Heartfelt Appeal for a Graceful Exit,” prompted a deluge of information and requests for information on how people too sick to reap meaningful pleasure from life might be able to control their death.
Though I wince at the redundancy, funeral “pre-planning” is a phenomenon receiving increased attention, and a growing number of Web-based guides tell how to go about it. As www.funerals.org puts it: “Funeral planning starts at home.
The fear of death and dying is quite common, and most people fear death to varying degrees. To what extent that fear occurs and what it pertains to specifically varies from one person to another.
Frank Ostaseski, an internationally respected Buddhist teacher and pioneer in end-of-life care, has accompanied over 1,000 people through their dying process.
For more than 50 years, Ram Dass has watched as other nontraditional spiritual leaders have come and gone while he has remained.
Studies of dying patients who seek a hastened death have shown that their reasons often go beyond physical ones like intractable pain or emotional ones like feeling hopeless.
Palliative care specialist BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger explain how to bring more meaning and less suffering to the end of life.
This year has awakened us to the fact that we die. We’ve always known it to be true in a technical sense, but a pandemic demands that we internalize this understanding. It’s one thing to acknowledge the deaths of others, and another to accept our own.
It is extremely difficult for anyone, especially young people in their 20s and 30s, to be told that their treatment(s) haven’t worked. If the cancer you have continues to progress despite treatment, it may be called end-stage cancer.