Poets and seers often write about death, but have rarely seen it, writes Sherwin Nuland. Doctors and nurses, who see death often, rarely write about it. We see media images of death all the time - corpses in Bosnia, Chechnya, Rwanda. But dying - what it feels like to die - remains taboo. It may be our most universal story, yet we know little about it.
Nuland violates this taboo in How We Die, a powerful, fascinating, elegantly written, and profoundly useful book about dying. A professor of surgery and the history of medicine at Yale University, Nuland explains how the body reacts to aging and disease, and how heart attacks, AIDS, and age kill. And how doctors, families, and patients struggle with death.
He has some bad news: for most of us, the fantasy of saying our eloquent goodbyes, then lying down in our beds and peacefully fading away isn't going to occur. Our culture fosters the notion that medical technology can stall, sometimes defeat death. We also like to keep our dead and dying out of sight. So most of us - about 80 percent - die in hospitals.
Despite the grimness of the subject matter, How We Die is not at all depressing. What's sad, as Nuland makes clear, is how we stumble blindly toward death. What's also sad is that we do not know how to help the people we love to die. Increasingly, these topics are being taken up in online forums. If they're not all talking about this book already, they will be soon.
Nuland not only offers useful medical information; he tells us how to die in the best possible way. Death is almost always sad, more often than not lonely, and likely to be painful. But we're not helpless, and need not despair. "When my time comes," Nuland writes, "I will seek hope in the knowledge that, insofar as possible, I will not be allowed to suffer or be subjected to needless attempts to maintain life; I will seek it in the certainty that I will not be abandoned to die alone; I am seeking it now, in the way I try to live my life, so that those who value what I am will have profited from my time on earth and be left with comforting recollections of what we have meant to one another."
How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter, by Sherwin B. Nuland: US$13 (paperback). Vintage: (800) 793 2665, +1 (410) 848 1900, fax (800) 793 2436.
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A Deadly Taboo
