We’ve forgotten how to die
by Giles Fraser, UnHerd:
Secularism can no longer cope with human mortality.
Why do some people take a peep at the last few pages of a novel first? Yes, we know it’s cheating. But forget whether a cheeky glance at the ending constitutes a great crime against reading — why do many of us instinctively feel that the end contains some sort of privileged information? After all, the juiciest bits often tend to occur in the middle of the book.
Surely the answer is something like this: we look to the end to make sense of the whole. This is where things come together, or not. Where the point is revealed, where some sort of unity is achieved or isn’t. The end gives the story its meaning. Significantly, the word “end” can mean both last things and purpose.
As with novels, so too with human lives. We are story-seeking animals. Even in a post-Christian society, we retain some residual sense that how we end — how we die — contains a special significance for the meaning of our lives as a whole. And this is why there is something especially disturbing about the findings of a Lancet Commission report published this week, that argues we have over-medicalised death and have lost a sense of what a good one might look like.
Imagine if we were to take a look at the last few pages of the book of our lives. There we are, in a huge hospital, surrounded by masked medics and machines. We are not doing very much because we are all doped up. And due to Covid, not even in the presence of our loved ones. The ending is one of medical failure. “This situation has further fuelled the fear of death, reinforcing the idea of health-care services as the custodians of death,” says the report.
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