Tag: death
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Death and dignity – a lesson learned from my father
Dhastagir SheriffChennai, Tennessee, India I was working as a professor of biochemistry and as the vice-principal of faculty at the Ambedkar Medical College in Bangalore. It was a welcome change after working in Libya for ten years and I was bubbling with energy and ambition to serve the cause of education. I felt that a…
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Surrealist art and the resolution of absurd
Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel Epigram “There must be a clear preoccupation with death—intimations of mortality . . . Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.” Mark Rothko, 1958, The Pratt Institute, on the function of art The Problem Fear of death permeates medical practice despite our best efforts to modulate serotonin,…
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Unfinished business: End of life care and regrets in the films of Akira Kurosawa
X.M. GriffithsTuckahoe, NY, USA Death and mortality were recurrent themes in Akira Kurosawa’s works but the director examined the issues most acutely in the films Ikiru (1952) and Madadayo (1993). Though the two films hail from different periods of his career, in each the main character is forced to face their own mortality, which provides…
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Defining dead
Arya ShahRochester, MN, USA The checklist of death was foreign to mewhen I first ran down its list.It’s hard to describe that encounter with death,but let’s see if I can convey the gist. It started on a bright summer morning.A boy woke up for a day of fun.He planned to go on a hike with…
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Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and the five stages of grief
Katharine LawrenceFlorida, United States Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. “Vermiform appendix! Kidney!” he said to himself. “It’s not a question of appendix or kidney, but of life and . . . death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and I cannot stop it.…
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Death and the organ donor
Karen DyerUnited Kingdom Historically the “death debate” has been long and intensive, and the definition of death has evolved over the centuries. The ancient civilizations looked for an “absence of a heartbeat” and a “lack of breathing.” By the eighteenth century, however, fears of a misdiagnosis of death led doctors to suggest that the only…
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My father’s glasses
Geoff KronikBrookline, Massachusetts, United States I took them with me when I left the hospital that day, but five years later, I still have not put them on. Holding the glasses starts a movie in my memory, a biography of my father, but if I imagine wearing them a stranger appears on the screen. That…
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Is there a good death?
Frank Gonzalez-CrussiChicago, Illinois, United States Is there a good death? I contend that there is no answer to this question. There is indeed a rare species of questions that are unanswerable, and this is one of them. Those who have escaped from a near-fatal accident, or recovered from a serious illness, or somehow realized that…