Dying Shouldn’t Be So Brutal
Ira Byock, New York Times (January 31, 2015)
Where is the public outrage over needless suffering at the end of life?
The New York Times has launched a new death and dying focused section for its Opinionator series called The End. No need to guess what The End will be about. All the news that fits to print now features:
…essays by people who work in fields dealing with death and dying, like medicine, ethics and religion, as well as personal essays by those who have experienced the death of a loved one.
It appears that the above essay by Ira Byock is The End’s first post and it’s really good. I’m hopeful that other essays for this series also tackle the politics of dying with such honesty.
Meg (Death Ref’s formatting guru and enforcer) reprimands me every time I quote long(ish) text from articles but I couldn’t resist this time. Here is a great section from Byock’s essay:
It’s high time we boomers shook off our post-menopausal and “low T” malaise and reclaimed our mojo. Remember Howard Beale, the fictional news anchor brilliantly portrayed by Peter Finch in the 1976 film “Network”? Fed up with the inequities of modern life, one night Beale exhorts viewers to go to their windows and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” We’ll figure out the details later, he says; right now it’s time to yell. And, across the country, they do.
The persistently unsafe state of dying in America should provoke a Howard Beale moment. We’ll find solutions in various white papers and Institute of Medicine reports. First, we need outrage.
Byock also references the 1970’s hospice movement in his essay and I’m glad to see that. So much knowledge and awareness about 1970’s Death Movements has been forgotten and needs to be re-discovered. It was a moment in which choosing how to die became both personal and political.
Who knew that the Gray Lady recognised the need for something like The End. The Opinionator’s editors seem to respect and understand another of Byock’s crucial points from the essay: DYING is not easy, but it needn’t be this hard.
The Death Reference Desk will most certainly keep an eye on The End.