An Ordinary Death

Death is the great inevitability. The one commonality that all people experience is that we will all take our first breath and we will all take our last breath. If we think about it at all, we also all long for ordinary, simple deaths. But our medicalized way of dying destroys that hope. Right now, Medicare reimburses for all the wrong things. If we keep our elderly and terminally ill in the hospital system, punctured and tortured by one useless and expensive test and procedure after another, Medicare covers the costs. But if we bring them home to offer comfort, gentleness and safety during their last days, Medicare bows out, essentially abandoning us and them. Hospice, which is funded by Medicare, will provide only two to three visits a week by a caregiver to give a bath, and one visit a week by a nurse to check on the patient. That is all until the patient has just a day or two left. Unless a family has private resources to cover nursing or home health aide help, they are on their own. Completely. And generally completely unequipped. In addition, few people will take adequate time to address how they wish to spend their last days and months. Without good preparation, decisions are left in the hands of frantic children or other relatives, and generally defaulted to a health care system unprepared to handle the needs to the dying. Those who seek to challenge the current system and extricate their loved ones from such torture are often told that they "are trying to kill" someone. Further, if we continue in our current path, the coming death tsunami of this giant baby-boomer generation is going to bankrupt the country. Their families will play the game of repeated hospitalizations in order to keep their financial heads above water. Everyone suffers. This story of one woman's death and her family's determination to give her "an ordinary death" opens the discussion: "How than shall we die?"