Typing out my clinical encounter with a 81 year old patient (Mr WW) late at night and having a few thoughts...

I was just typing out the part about this patient's family history and this question struck me: When is it fine for someone to die?

Mr WW's dad passed away when he was 95 and his mum at 97. His dad had diabetes and his mum suffered from a heart problem and arthritis. I was deciding on how to phrase my sentence- did they die with those conditions or from those conditions? And then I decided: it did not matter. They lived till such a ripe old age, they should have died anyway. It did not matter what conditions they had when they were living or what they actually did die off. I should move on with my life.

2 seconds later and after finishing that section of my report, I felt the strangest feeling ever. I could not move on to the other sections. I felt so guilty for being so nonchalant about their deaths! It was as though I had just single handed-ly, in the most god-like fashion, waved my hands and passed the death sentence on these 2 individuals, simply because they had lived for too long. I might as well have killed them when I callously dismissed furthering the thought of 'what killed them?'. It might as well have been society, and our notion of life-expectancy that killed them.

And so I guess, with this acute bolt of my conscience which prompted this entry, my answer to my initial question is: Never. It is never fine for someone to die. And this probably ties in with how I had an inexplicable urge to wish Mr WW well when I left him. I bid him goodbye by wishing that he'll live to a 100 years old.

(And being able to tie in my thoughts and actions into a single unifying theory of what I believe in makes me happy. I think of myself as a sane and normal person whose brain and actions are well-integrated, with consistent thoughts.)