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The Lost Art of Dying: A different sort of pandemic preparedness

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  • The Lost Art of Dying: A different sort of pandemic preparedness

    Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/b...lost-art-dying


    L.S. Dugdale, MD
    The Lost Art of Dying
    A different sort of pandemic preparedness
    Posted Jul 16, 2020

    For most of the past century, we in the West have lived as though death were optional—or at least largely avoidable. But the pandemic has challenged this notion. COVID-19 has brought into relief the threat of mortality in a way that few Americans have ever experienced it. Daily mortality counts and mobile morgues have made death a reality. The question is: What should we do about it?

    The dominant reaction has been instinctual—fight the virus and run from death. We have thrown the best of Western medicine at COVID: searching for vaccines, treatments, cures. We have stayed home. We wear masks and maintain a safe social distance. And we have long since stopped gathering at theaters, restaurants, churches, and schools. All of these efforts have aimed to reduce spread—and, therefore, death.

    As a society quick to embrace the cutting edge, what we have failed to realize is that one of the best tools we have for pandemic preparedness is more than 600 years old. That tool is called the ars moriendi, which is Latin for the “art of dying.” The ars moriendi was a body of literature that developed in the aftermath of the mid-14th century outbreak of bubonic plague that ravaged Western Europe. Its earliest iterations consisted of handbooks on how to prepare for death by living well. They contained advice, prayers, and protocols for both the living and the dying. The genre grew enormously popular, and its many variations circulated for half a millennium.

    Why should we expect medieval handbooks to help with the coronavirus? The answer, in part, has to do with the fundamental orientation of the ars moriendi. The handbooks understood death as a fact of life. If it weren’t a recurrence of bubonic plague, then famine or war could signal human finitude. People were thus advised to prepare well for death, because it would surely come. This sort of thinking could benefit all of us as the COVID-19 pandemic evolves into COVID-20.

    According to the ars moriendi, preparing for death was an art that was meant to be exercised over a lifetime. Practicing the art meant living intentionally and wisely. It required taking stock of and attending to relationships, possessions, anxieties, and spiritual beliefs. People of the late Middle Ages wanted to die well and thus strove to live well, measuring the tasks, goals, and behaviors of any day against mortality itself. “If we are going to die, how then should we live?” they asked one another...
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