Palliative care may have been a new terrain for me as a student nurse, but it was a place I felt comfortable navigating. Hence, I gravitated towards oncology. My interest in works about death and dying is a busman's holiday. It's a peek at the other side, the patient's side.
In the three works below, terminal illness is characterized as new terrain. With the diagnosis appears new shades that contour the characters' physical worlds. Light is perceived anew, so is breath, and so are priorities. In terms of diagnoses: Nina Riggs writes about her breast cancer journey, Molly Shannon's Joanne has leiomyosarcoma, and the patients in "Extremis" represent the typical medical ICU population.
I appreciate "The Bright Hour" and "Other People" most for their honest humor. They appealed to my morbid sense of humor. Part of what draws me to these works is that it is a terrain (barring a swift death) that I will likely enter. Protracted illness is a product of modern medicine. The works provide an aerial view of the terrain, not street directions. In all three, what one can clearly see is that autonomy in how one chooses to die is a value to be upheld.
In the three works below, terminal illness is characterized as new terrain. With the diagnosis appears new shades that contour the characters' physical worlds. Light is perceived anew, so is breath, and so are priorities. In terms of diagnoses: Nina Riggs writes about her breast cancer journey, Molly Shannon's Joanne has leiomyosarcoma, and the patients in "Extremis" represent the typical medical ICU population.
I appreciate "The Bright Hour" and "Other People" most for their honest humor. They appealed to my morbid sense of humor. Part of what draws me to these works is that it is a terrain (barring a swift death) that I will likely enter. Protracted illness is a product of modern medicine. The works provide an aerial view of the terrain, not street directions. In all three, what one can clearly see is that autonomy in how one chooses to die is a value to be upheld.
The Bright Hour (2017)
by Nina Riggs
Memoir: terminal
Diagnosis seen as new
Terrain and new light.
Other People
(2016, dir. Chris Kelly)
Year with dying mom.
Home turns to new terrain for
Caregivers, patient.
Extremis
(2016, dir. Dan Krauss)
Too brief exam on
Palliative challenges in
Modern medicine