Dying to meet you: Facing mortality and enabling patient styles

Abstract

This paper is intended to emphasize the existence of prognostic uncertainty in providing survival estimates while also providing a method for caring to those who want to authentically help dying patients. Facing one’s own mortality helps one authentically and compassionately be there for dying patients. The transforming experience of death as essential to one’s self as human being, recognizing that one is living a story with death necessarily a part, promises to overcome the tendency to deny the existential meaning of death for dying patients. This tendency manifests itself through dishonesty about medicine’s limitations in creating prognoses, and specifically survival estimates, as well as in holding only a curative and not palliative goal of treatment. This tendency will be replaced by honest and authentic compassionate actions with those in the process of dying. Representing this change is a focus on the patient as person, living a certain lifestyle, and defining himself by significant events and relationships in the past, present, and future. Death and dying become meaningful through incorporation into the story and style that is the patient. This meaning that is facilitated by caregivers and created by patients is central to achieving a “good death.”