The Art of Dying

Reflections on death and dying, delivered as a keynote address at a Medical Humanities Conference in Singapore, October 2024

This short paper reflects on the attitudes that modern society has towards death, which affect and form the language that we use to describe death. The key domains of concern to the dying are described, as well as the patterns of social interactions. It explores how the visual arts can offer an alternate and cathartic form of communication of death, as shown by the patient experience with cancer. Ultimately, it encourages us to view medicine as an art, and also art as medicine.

inter-disciplinary.net

Many of us know, love, and have cared for someone that saw the end of their lives much too quickly. Almost everyone knows personally or knows of someone who went to the doctor for a routine medical exam and walked out several tests later with a condemning prognosis. In these instances, individuals may not be ready to die but the fact of the matter is that they are going to. In a lot of these cases the end of life can be drawn out, speaking relatively to the prognosis, and it can be painful, it can feel burdensome, and it can wipe any lasting dignity that a person may have had prior to the disease. Increasingly across the globe, medical aid-in-dying is becoming a legitimate and viable option for those individuals that wish to take back control from their ailments, even if it is just in the final act of dying on their own terms. This ethnology will take into consideration the anthropology of law, the cultural implications and morality concerns surrounding voluntary euthanasia and redefining a "good-death" in the United States and Japan.

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1978

have a unique authority and competence in the interpretation of the human encounter with death. Theirs is an extraordinary range of experience, in clinical research with psychedelic substances, in cross-cultural and medical anthropology, and in the analysis of Oriental and archaic literatures. Their pioneering work with psychedelics administered to individuals dying of cancer opened domains of experience that proved to be nearly identical to those already mapped in the "Books of the Dead," those mystical visionary accounts of the posthumous journeys of the soul. The Grof/Halifax book and these ancient resources both show the imminent experience of death as a continuation of what had been the hidden aspect of the experience of life.

Cadernos Brasileiros de Terapia Ocupacional

This theoretical essay aims to propose reflections on death and dying through the prism of possible antagonisms, illness and human occupations involved in this process. The antagonisms are put up for discussion obeying the sense of mutual opposition between life and death, birth and death, as well as between their prediction and their negation. Illness is discussed from the perspective of Laplantine's dynamic and ontological models, opening up reflections on the meaning of illness for the patient, who is often expropriated from their dying process. It also addresses how death is currently pushed behind the scenes of social life. Finally, the occupations of death based on the “principles of good death” are approached from the perspective of occupational therapy, discussing funeral preparations and rites developed by the deceased, their social circle and by health professionals, religious people, funeral agents and cemetery workers. We understand that death is a social process.

2020

Death, Dying, Culture: An Interdisciplinary Interrogation, 2013

The birth and death awaken us enormous curiosity and apprehension. To know that one day we'll die, contributes to death being feared, hidden, silenced or ignored. We may try to escape, or push it away, but it remains (uncomfortably) close by. Most likely is dying away from family, at hospital, where, despite the scientific advances and good health care, death fear still reigns. We associate death with images of funerals, pilgrimages, worships, tombs, wills or mourning. Its representations are anchored in knowledge, culture, religion, ideology and person concepts. We investigated the representations of death among future health professionals (medical and nursing students), that try to avoid death of others in a public context (hospital), and those that question life through death (biology students), in a population of approximately 300 participants. In a first study, we determined the dimensions of thoughts, feelings and images about death, and analyzed them, according to the course and sex. Subsequently, we conducted an experience focused on the influence of the social context of death (with short films showing the death of someone, in private or in a hospital-encircled by family or by health professionals), in the way death is perceived, considering two experimental conditions and a monitoring condition (without film); all participants answered a questionnaire. We found a strong similarity between the representations of women and nurse students-evidenced greater emotional involvement, closeness to the other and practical/ritualistic sense-and between the representations of men and future doctors-showed more emotional distancing and revolt, as if death was controllable. Particularly in the private context, death is perceived as a real possibility/proximity, evoking strong malaise. By contrast, in the control condition, it is viewed with detachment, as deferrable and impersonal. This reveals well the social interdict that overshadows death and dying.

TEXT

is currently undertaking a research higher degree examining sequel memoir at Central Queensland University. Growing up as the daughter of a minister of religion, she saw death from a spiritual perspective. Her career as a nurse led to her seeing death and dying from yet another angle and, as a writer, she is compelled to write about these deaths. She has had work published in an anthology, Eavesdropping (2012), and in Idiom23 literary magazine (2013, 2014). She has completed a memoir, 'Nightmare in Paradise' (2013) and is currently writing a sequel to this.