We’ve seen it so many times. A young, handsome man rushed into the emergency room with a gunshot wound. A flurry of white coats racing the clock: CPR, the heart zapper, the order for a scalpel. Stat! Then finally, the flatline.
This is Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider’s biggest pet peeve. Where are the TV scripts about the elderly grandmothers dying of heart failure at home? What about an episode on the daughter still grieving her father’s fatal lung cancer, ten years later?
“Acute, violent death is portrayed many, many, many times more than a natural death,” says Ungerleider, an internal medicine doctor and founder of End Well, a nonprofit focused on shifting the American conversation around death.
Don’t even get her started on all the miraculous CPR recoveries where people’s eyes flutter open and they pop out of the hospital the next day.
All these television tropes are causing real harm, she says, and ignore the complexity and choices people face at the end of life.
There’s plenty of horror that really needs to be shown with “natural” deaths as well. All of the shaking and pained gasping that typically happens leading up to the final moments should scare the absolute shit out of everyone.
It’s just one of those things society tries to hide and pretend went peacefully like childbirth. The only actually peaceful death I’ve ever witnessed was my dogs being put down by a very nice vet.
I work in hospice, so comfort and a peaceful passing is always our goal. There are some deaths that are more unfortunate than others, but with support the majority of deaths under care thankfully aren’t “shaking and pained gasping.” Still far from the Hollywood version of being coherent enough to pass along one final message before heading into a bright light. When these types of media are the most common source of information regarding death, it can definitely be more challenging to prepare a family or patient for what’s to come.
That “final moments” thing is hard.
The last time my mother was remotely coherent was about a week and a half before she died (cancer, hospice, at home, 2010 when I was 23), and she said some really awful stuff to me and about me that still sticks with me today…
I know her brain was heavily misfiring at that point, because she also called me mommy and curled up in my lap, but it still never really leaves. It’s an incredibly painful memory I have of her last moments of being able to communicate… and I had/have no idea how to handle it.
Also that whole closing the eyes thing? Yeah, I was incredibly disturbed that that doesn’t work at all. There’s a reason they cover the face with a sheet.
Upvote and thanks for doing the meaningful, difficult work that you do.
My mom would like to have a word with you