The coronavirus is helping us rehearse for our own deaths
“A lot of people want to talk about the big questions; they just don’t know how to get started.”
In her forthcoming book The Lost Art of Dying, primary care physician and medical ethicist Lydia Dugdale tells the story of an elderly man she calls Mr. Turner. She and her colleagues resuscitated him three times in one night, and still he died. Despite giving him the best that medicine had to offer, she felt she had contributed to his dying poorly. That led her to explore what it might mean to die well.
We might say that it is human nature to avoid conversations about death and dying, but in your book you argue that it is largely cultural.
At other times and in other places people participated much more actively than they do now in the care of a dying person. They themselves were practicing, rehearsing for their own deaths. They were reminding themselves of what they believed, so that when their time came, they were prepared.
