Good End of Life

At Books, Inc. Opera Plaza, Katy Butler introduced her new book, The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life, intended to be a “workaround” to the problem of medical interventions used to prolong life at the expense of quality of life, as her father’s painful 5-year dying process described in her first book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (2013). 

Sociology Professor Becky Yang Hsu discussed her upcoming book, Happiness in China: Family, Fate, and the Good Death, at the University of San Francisco. She explained that death can be “happy” in China because it is a social event which strengthens existing relationships: 

·       Interacting with the dead in the context of family lineage rituals is a regular feature of China (e.g., household shrines, visiting graves, tomb-sweeping holiday, etc.)

·       People talk about preparing for one’s funeral as a good and happy event (e.g., preparing burial clothes)

·       Family, especially relationship with parents, is central for the young and urban (e.g., affirming family lineage brings calm).

In China, where death is frequently reinforced as a social phenomenon that is meaningful and represents a next step towards something that is continuous with one’s social relationships, people can feel calm and even happy about it.  

In contrast, critics often say people don’t know how to die in the United States because people endure painful and often pointless medical procedures for a chance to gain a few days of extra life, consume a lot of resources and time delaying the inevitable, and then are expected to make their own peace by themselves in their last days or hours.  Becky suggested that perhaps understanding death in an asocial way makes it difficult to die a good death, and misunderstanding death as solitary makes it harder for the living to grieve.