Book review: Seize The Day - How The Dying Teach Us To Live

By DAVID STENHOUSE
Published on Monday 6 February 2012 00:00

THREE-and-a-half years ago I visited the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast, one of the earliest Hospices in North America, and one of the largest.

There, in a tastefully manicured garden, under palm trees lazily stirred by tropical breezes, a senior member of staff explained how far they would go to ensure that the life of their residents ended according to their own wishes. “If someone tells us that they want to go with a Martini in their hands we’ll do our best to find the olive.”

Marie de Hennezel’s Seize The Day, first published in France in 1995, is the story of a groundbreaking palliative care facility in Paris in which terminally ill patients would spend their final days and hours. It is a measure of how far palliative care has come that many of the patients seen by de Hennezel, a psychologist and psychotherapist, had not even been told that they were terminally ill. Typically they would be told that they were being moved into “respite care.” Nor did the French medical system seem to care much for the sensitivities of the dying. One man, a charming Russian émigré called Dmitri, describes how hurt he is when, surfacing from the anaesthetic during open heart surgery he hears his surgeon say contemptuously: “Take it away. I don’t want this one to die here.”

De Hennezel’s patients, Patrick who has Aids and is dying with inexorably progressing tumours on his legs, and Daniele, whose slow death from motor neurone disease moves President Mitterrand when he visits the facility, all struggle in their own way with the inevitability of their situation. De Hennezel believes that one of the reasons human beings struggle so at the end of their lives is that they have unresolved issues, and that the powerlessness of dying recalls painful memories from our powerless childhoods. Her role is often to sit, to listen and to simply hold her patients.

In the more than 30 years since the publication of Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s ground-breaking On Death And Dying, the literature of death and dying has grown surprisingly slowly. Bookshops which groan under the weight of diet books, fashion tips and celebrity biographies will struggle to come up with more than a few titles on the business of what happens next. In parts this book is profoundly moving, and since its original publication has developed something of a cult following, though at moments it does show that even experts struggle to write about death without resorting to sentimentality.

Dignity and autonomy in death is likely to become one of the most pressing issues in healthcare over the next few decades as an ageing population, and one used to unprecedented levels of autonomy and control over their lives, enter a period of life in which powerlessness is still too often the norm.

In a world in which most people associate the words “dying” and “clinic” with euthanasia and Dignitas, this is a timely reminder of the powerful truth at the heart of the hospice movement: that dying is living too.

• Seize The Day: How The Dying Teach Us To Live

Marie de Hennezel, translated by Carol Brown Janeway

Macmillan, £12.99

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