MelbourneNorg

Great piece. Thanks.

I had an experience along these lines when my gran died. She was in her 80s, had a couple of severe strokes in quick succession, was in a coma and pneumonia was starting to set in. A good innings and all that. The rest of the family had agreed to withdraw life support. My dad just couldn’t see that she was going to die, and kept demanding more be done, getting increasingly agitated and irrational while doing so. I had to pull him aside and gently but firmly point out the inevitability of the situation. It took quite some time talking it through, going through increasingly convoluted treatment scenarios and unlikely outcomes, before he finally accepted it. She died soon after that afternoon.It made me think how odd it was that within the space of a couple of generations, with a modicum of antibiotics and a lack of world wars, just how divorced from death we had become; how alien and frightening one of life’s most certain events was to those who are never confronted with it. 

Agree. We were all shocked when we rocked up one day to find my grandmother dead in her East Fremantle unit. Even though she was in her 80s, we just expected her to go on forever because she was so lively and active in the community. Now my mum is on borrowed time in her late 60s due to advanced pancreatic cancer and we don’t take a single day for granted. A Buddhist monk in Perth who won the Curtin Medal remarks that when we hear that someone in the family has died we should say “yes I expected they would (at some stage)” instead of being so shocked that death dare visit upon us!