What my father's death taught me about 'Being Mortal' - Kevin O'Connor

[erronis]

https://vtdigger.org/2019/01/13/fathers-death-taught-mortal/

Having been a fan of Atul Gawande's books and viewpoints on life, medicine, and dying, I thought this piece was very good.

This was supposed to be a simple story about Atul Gawande — a New England surgeon turned author of the nationally best-selling book “Being Mortal” — born of an unexpected meeting in the fall of 2017.

“The conversation I felt like I was having was, do we fight, or do we give up?” I heard him say on public radio the weekend before. “And the reality was that it’s not do we fight, or do we give up? It’s what are we fighting for? People have priorities, besides just surviving no matter what. You have reasons you want to be alive. What are those reasons?”

Then my father was diagnosed with fast-spreading cancer and died soon after, turning this into something personal.

Most people don’t want to think, let alone talk, about mortality, starting with health care providers who often view saving lives as the only measure of success. That’s why Gawande — believing physicians and patients need to acknowledge and address reality — wrote “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.”

...

“Accepting that life can be shorter than we want is very difficult,” Gawande concludes. “It’s easy for all of us, patients and doctors, to fall back on looking for what more we can do, regardless of what we might be sacrificing along the way. You know, people have priorities besides just living longer. You’ve got to ask what those priorities are.”

For in the end, “Being Mortal” isn’t about how to die, but how to live.