An Invitation to Rethink Dying

In our modern societies, death has quickly been relegated to the wings, removed from the collective stage, confined within the sanitized walls of hospitals and other healthcare settings. We almost no longer die at home, surrounded by loved ones, but rather more often in a medical bed, surrounded by machines, protocols, and healthcare professionals.

This new reality results from a dual movement: the rise of scientific progress on the one hand, and the disappearance of religion on the other; movements that were most rapid in Quebec. Once a realm of the sacred and symbolization, death has now become a medical object, an expression of individual freedom. While this medicalization offers comfort and pleases the mind, it does change our worldview.

Death, Under the Scalpel of Science

The modern medical project, driven by the quest for mastery, control, performance, and individual choice, leaves little room for the unknown and therefore for death. Even palliative care, supposedly intended to rehabilitate a more humane approach to the end of life, contributes to the medicalization of the end of life and death, while technical procedures and protocols multiply.

A society that has lost its rituals

The gradual disappearance of religious rites in accompanying the dying has left a huge symbolic void. Where once death was marked by prayers, vigils, and gestures that gave meaning and structure to the event, what often remains are decisions regarding levels of care, consent to refuse life-saving treatment, hospital protocols, an impersonal room from which the body is removed as soon as death is pronounced, a personalized ceremony in the presence of the ashes, but less and less of the body. The dying person, once the conduit and witness of a collective memory, becomes a problem to be solved: we don't really have time to watch over our dead, we have to be productive, I have work tomorrow, and the children have school! Reinvesting the humanity of dying

And yet, there is still life in dying. The end of life, however fragile, can be the setting for powerful moments: music that awakens a memory, a hand placed on a cheek, a word spoken at the right time. There is meaning in a birthday celebrated in a hospital bed, in a video chat with distant loved ones, a moment of communion between brothers and sisters. The dying person is never more than a "patient" or a "dying body": they remain a father, a mother, a friend, a lover. They continue to exist in the eyes of others, in the social bond, in the memory they still share.

An invitation to welcome ordinary death

This is where the concept of "ordinary dying," championed by Dr. Kathryn Mannix, takes on its full meaning. This approach reminds us that death has not always been this medicalized drama, this extraordinary moment to be controlled at all costs. Dying, in its simplest form, can be a natural, calm, and accompanied process, far from the chaos of emergency rooms or relentless therapeutic intervention. Ordinary dying is that time when we are awake, when we talk, when we still breathe together, when symptoms are relieved without erasing the person. It invites us to de-spectacularize death in order to better restore its humanity. According to Dr. Mannix, the last generation of people to have experienced ordinary death in the West is about to disappear. A whole body of knowledge will disappear with them.

What if, instead of eliminating all suffering with medical assistance in dying or even palliative care, we also dared to view dying as a rich, social, symbolic, and profoundly human experience?