Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: End of Life

  • Thinking of my dying grandmother at the Natural History Museum

    Roxana CazanAltoona, Pennsylvania, United States At the Natural History Museumin Salt Lake City, I am promised“the assemblage of nature’s ultimatemachine,” its precise lurking,one foot crossing the Silurian,its simian lurch trapped behindshatterproof glass.I zigzag through the dinosaur world,the tender bend of boney necks,their petrified savagery mintedinto thick layers of shale,their swift death on display.When I pass…

  • Margaret Edson’s W;t: Lessons on person-centered care

    Atara MessingerToronto, Ontario, Canada American playwright Margaret Edson’s 1998 play W;t has been described as “ninety minutes of suffering and death mitigated by a pelvic exam and a lecture on seventeenth-century poetry.”1 When W;t was first published, most theater companies rejected it on the grounds that its subject matter would be too difficult for audiences…

  • Until I get my strength back

    Anne L. RooneyOak Park, Illinois, USA The emaciated woman lay scrunched in a fetal position with her back to me. I stood in the doorway to her cramped bedroom. “Hello, Loretta. Can I come in?” Loretta rolled over, squinting with suspicion. “You a nurse?” I nodded. “I’m a nurse who visits people who are really…

  • A CV for posterity

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece The British Medical Journal (BMJ) is one of the oldest and most eminent general medical journals. Among its many and varied features is a regular obituaries page. Departed members of all branches of the medical profession, academic teachers, researchers and Nobel Prize winners, hospital and army doctors, and general practitioners, are remembered…

  • The morning ritual

    Peter H. BerczellerDordogne, France Years ago, I heard the adage: “When you get up in the morning, and you don’t see your name in the Times obituaries, you’re good for another day.” I was young then, with no understanding of the seriousness beneath this seemingly witty remark. As a medicine resident, I was no stranger to…

  • Why not let her go gently into that good night?

    Victoria LimIowa City, Iowa, United States One early morning I was paged to see an eighty-five-year-old patient in the dialysis unit with low blood pressure. I learned that she had diabetes, hypertension, and diffuse atherosclerosis. In the past decade she had undergone four major surgeries for blocked arteries and had suffered two strokes. For the…

  • Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and their doctor are dead

    Joshua NiforatosGregory RuteckiCleveland, Ohio, United States ROSENCRANTZ: “Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering – stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it.…

  • Death and dying

    Tolani OlonisakinPittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Six weeks after I turned eighteen, I lost my father. I was told he died of a cardiac arrest. One minute he was reading the morning paper, and the next minute he lay sprawled across the living room floor, lifeless and inanimate. I had not seen the man in two years;…

  • The last talk

    Inge Marry ShikangalaWindhoek, Namibia In April 2016, I took my father to Engela State Hospital at the northern border of Namibia. This was the nearest hospital, but still twenty kilometers away from where my father lived. My two cousins helped me get my very tall father in and out of my small car, which in…

  • Dance with death

    Marianne RogoffKentfield, California, USA Stephanie lived alone in a rented cottage at the back of a garden path. When she was dying at age fifty of ovarian cancer, her only vow was not to die alone, so she assembled an army of friends to sign up for two-hour shifts, 24/7, to keep her company. She…