As Britain limps through a sixth week of lockdown, are we all still pretending we can live forever? As the debate about how to defeat coronavirus rages on, I’ve found myself thinking about how my grandmother faced her own death.
She was intimately acquainted with mortality. She’d been a doctor and a farmer, and had by old age outlived her brother, two husbands and three of her four children as well as most of her friends. Even so, confronting her own decline into Alzheimer’s took tremendous courage. While she still had capacity, my mum and I helped her go through the details of a document that listed her medical preferences, for when she no longer had the capacity to advocate for herself.
It was not easy reading: a grim catalogue of scenarios such as seizures and strokes, defibrillation, ventilation, and the circumstances in which she would like medical treatment or palliative care. Despite her tough pragmatism, and her faith in life after death, I remember how tense and miserable she was the day we got the document notarised.
Some time later, after dementia claimed her once razor-sharp mind, she fell out of bed in the nursing home and broke her finger. Under safeguarding guidelines, the staff were obliged to call an ambulance, and the paramedics were in turn obliged to take her to hospital. These rules could not be sidestepped, despite everyone involved knowing that for someone in their 90s, with advanced dementia and a minor injury, transfer to hospital was likely to cause extreme distress and could even be a death sentence.
Happily, the document detailing her preferences absolved staff and paramedics alike of their reluctant obligation to follow these rules even against their own clinical judgement. They splinted the finger in situ, it mended just fine, and she was spared a confusing and frightening experience.
We have been considerably less clear-sighted than my grandmother about facing the implications of coronavirus. On the surface, much of the response to the government’s measures has treated the situation as a continuation of the Brexit wars. But beneath this displacement activity lurks a consensus that cuts across culture war lines for all but the youngest and most staunchly libertarian: swivel-eyed horror at the realisation that we haven’t, after all, vanquished death.
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