Avril Tynan // “Death is not an event in life,” wrote philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in the early 20th century, “We do not live to experience death” (6.4311). Of course, Wittgenstein could not know that 100 years later we would be living through a pandemic, but if Covid-19 has taught us anything, it is that death…
Tag: End-of-life
Ars Moriendi
Travis Chi Wing Lau // “We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.” – Atul Gawande Last week, I flew…
Glimpses of a Dying Mother
Benjamin Gagnon Chainey // If Death is a paradoxical mother, Ève, the dying mother of French philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous, is even more so. In her daughter’s phraseology, Ève Cixous is “a well alive dead woman” [1], coming back to life through the “Strange Autoportraits” that Hélène draws in Homère est Morte… (the English…
The Suffering Caregiver
Benjamin Gagnon Chainey ‘Is the experience of pain preferable to the anihilation of experience?[1]’ Hervé Guibert, Le mausolée des amants The question posed by Hervé Guibert, a French writer who died in 1991, while he was HIV-positive at the apex of the Western AIDS epidemic, resounds from the darkest areas of his terminal phase….