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Dear Life by Rachel Clarke review – somewhere towards the end

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/21/dear-life-doctors-story-love-loss-rachel-clarke-review

A palliative care specialist offers a tender meditation on how people confront their final days

Dying is what we do. Rich and poor, quickly or slowly, in pain or in peace, young and old and somewhere in between, we all come to our own sure extinction. But often, our own dying is not what we talk about, prepare for, live with or recognise as always waiting for us: “Nothing more true,” as Philip Larkin wrote in his terror-struck Aubade.

In part because of this human instinct to deny what is certain and yet can feel like a scandalous impossibility, dying can be a terrifying, farcical, violent and lonely business. It’s become easier to live longer, harder to die well. Death most often takes place in a hospital ward, frequently alone in a curtained bed, or with doctors heroically striving to bring the flickering self back from the brink: drugs and knives and needles and machines and masks and blood and the breath and agony and the heart failing and the body not allowed to give up. For hospitals are largely places of cure, of restoring people to life and to time. Death is a medical failure.

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