During my first year at DePauw, I was assigned a reading from a book called "A Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat." My interest was so piqued by the assigned snippet that I couldn’t help but read the entire book. I was captivated by the accessible and insightful way the author, Oliver Sacks, relayed unique patient case studies that he had encountered in his career as a neurologist. Sadly, Oliver Sacks, who touched many people through both his medical practice and his writing, and who made many lasting impacts in his field, passed away last Sunday, August 30, of terminal liver cancer.
Oliver Sacks wrote a moving piece for the New York Times last February, shortly after being diagnosed with cancer, in which he shared his thoughts and feelings about the last months of his life. “I feel intensely alive,” he writes, but adds, “I cannot pretend that I am without fear.” Sacks, who continued writing throughout the progression of his disease, brought the strange and unique experience of dying into the public eye. He grappled openly with the conflicting experiences of looking back upon the life that he had lived, trying to make the most of the time that he had left and coping with his unknown future.
Oliver Sacks’s willingness to share with the world what it is like to have a terminal illness is important. Our society seems to be uncomfortable thinking about or talking about death and dying. The symptoms of this squeamishness are evident in the experiences of the sick and elderly, and the way that many Americans die.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, there are a whopping 1.4 million Americans residing in nursing homes. Medical discoveries continue to offer new ways to prolong our lives—an exciting prospect—but are we as a society prepared for the implications of old age in a nursing home or a hospital bed?
This past summer, I was involved in research concerning the psychological experience of end-of-life patients with DePauw professor and clinical psychologist Dr. Ted Bitner and a fellow fourth-year DePauw student. We were investigating the experiences of end-of-life patients in the context of the health care system, especially in regards to the patient’s autonomy and their conception of their identity.
In the context of this research project, I had the opportunity to speak personally with palliative care patients and nursing home residents who were facing some of the same kinds of life-changing and emotionally conflicting experiences that Oliver Sacks starts to work through in his writing. However, unlike Sacks, many patients that I spoke to expressed a desire to resist change in their lives and spoke about their health issues as a battle to be fought and won, a perspective that seems to be pervasive in our culture.
However, examining the differences between the way doctors die and the way members of the general population die suggests that medical professionals do not endorse the mentality of fighting a disease at all costs when it comes to their own deaths. An article from 2013, How Doctors Die: Showing Others the Way, posits that physicians may be more likely to refuse certain life-saving procedures out of the knowledge that their risks may outweigh their benefits. This difference may result from the greater exposure that physicians have to the reality of end-of-life treatment. If this is true, education and openness may be one of the best ways to give each of us the best opportunity to live our lives deliberately, in the way that we want, even until the end.
Even for those like Oliver Sacks, physicians or health professionals who witness others deaths regularly, facing mortality is a daunting task. There isn’t one ideal way to approach death, but as a society and as individuals, we may have a lot to gain if we allow ourselves to talk candidly about the reality of end-of-life care.
-This column was originally published in The Prindle Post.
-Witter is a senior Prindle Intern from Fort Wayne, Indiana.