Crossing the Styx: Death and Medicine

I've just started working in a job where we are studying palliative medicine, which cares for patients who often are past curative treatment, often many cancer patients, and to provide quality of life, symptom and pain management, and help with transitions for the patient and the family as they prepare for death. This has made death and dying now a part of what I daily face.

In many ways, medicine sees death as a failure - a failure of the physician, maybe, or a failure of the science to move quick enough in finding treatments. What medicine is unconsciously denying, I think, is that death is really a natural end. Is it really best to "Not go gentle into that dark night, rage, rage against the dying of the light?" When the physician must say, "there is nothing more I can do," he fails to realize that there is still more he can do - he can ease that transition into death, decrease pain, help the patient reconcile to himself/herself that the end of life is near. And that is precisely what palliative medicine aims to do. I'd imagine that the ideal case is that palliative medicine wouldn't have to be a separate unit, but that eventually all doctors would be prepared to be with the dying patient, and not abandon them.

Sometimes when I read about the research on aging, and how some investigator here or there may believe he knows why cells fail and humans die, whether we are in fact a society petrified by fear of death. Our culture is funny, isn't it, that even as we try to erase the effects of aging with exercise, botox, and plastic surgery, we also have a remarkable crop of "thrillers" in our box office. And those thrillers bank on the fact that death is the more fearsome threat we will face, and use sudden deaths to get our adrenaline pumping.

In On Death And Dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, MD writes,
"in our unconscious, death is never possible in regard to ourselves. It is inconceivable for our unconscious to imagine an actual ending of our own life here on earth, and if this life of ours has to end, the ending is always attributed to a malicious intervention from the outside by someone else. In simple terms, in our unconscious mind we can only be killed; it is inconceivable to die of a natural cause or of old age."

In that thought may lie the answer. Although everything has been dying since life began, we are still unreconciled to the termination of existence. There is still something about death that seems unnatural, that seems wrong. And that consciousness of death's wrongness, I think, is evidence of general revelation to us by God that there is a curse - that man's immortal souls were meant to dwell in bodies just as immortal. I have trouble with the idea that death could have occured before the Fall. How could bodies programmed to die be "good"?

But since the resurrection of Christ, death has lost its power, and it merely is the door between one existence and eternity.