dying well

Finding peace with neighbors, ourselves, and God

My friend adjusted his hospital bed. Then he said his final words.

A good pastor looks for the sacred within the ordinary.

Modern medicine makes it difficult to die. Often, treatment seems to prolong not living so much as dying. With no earthly hope, Regan was spared all this.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison comes under the category of “Books to Be Read on an Annual Basis”—like Augustine’s Confessions, King Lear, or anything by Flannery O’Connor. In general, we read too many books and return to too few.

The emphasis on patients' rights and autonomy has been a weak remedy for medicalized death.