The uniqueness of how we deal with death

The recent controversy surrounding Bill Keller’s column about Lisa Adams, and subject of illness and dying in general, brings into bold relief just how personal the subject is. Dealing with death is little like marriage and fingerprints. No two are ever alike.

We celebrate and mark weddings and deaths. But what what are we marking, what we celebrating, really. These are moments in time, the background and history, joy and sorrow of which, may have gone on for years before, or may come years after.

Clearly to understand death, we must first understand the fullness life. In some ways its counter intuitive. It runs counter to our uniquely American notion of being in the moment.

Few understand all of as well as David Dow. David is a death penalty appeals lawyer in the State of Texas.  As such, he has dealt with death on a regular basis. He has also dealt with his own personal experiences  which he shares with me in talking about his memoir, Things I've Learned from Dying: A Book About Life. 

My conversation with David Dow:

A Better Way of Death

When we speak of death and sickness, it is often as if we are engaged in the language of war. We are battling, fighting, staving off. Perhaps we'd be better to think of it in language from the 17th Century poet John Donne, in “Death Be Not Proud.”

That might help us to understand a different language of death, but it was all before the advent of the medical/industrial complex. The ways in which the forces of medicine stand in the way of a “meaningful death.”

That’s the world that journalist Katie Butler writes about in Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death. Her story, in the NY Times Magazine, about her father's death, was one of the most commented upon articles in the history of the Magazine.

My conversation with Katie Butler: