In my ideal world, the topic of dying’s physical process would have been broached years earlier as we tried to help my mother grapple with a terminal condition. Maybe when we learned that her cancer had spread and was now incurable, a doctor could have had a follow-up discussion with my family. Or at some point along the trajectory of treatment, a doctor or nurse could have asked if—or when—my mother wanted to know something about the stages of a fatal cancer. But when a hospice nurse introduced the topic in our first meeting, we were still deeply grateful.
My regret that we didn’t know more sooner was what started me on the path toward writing the book, What Does it Feel Like to Die? When I set out to make a related video about the last few days of life, I hoped to approach it with the blunt honesty I remembered from the hospice nurse’s conversation. That meant I didn’t want to distract viewers with abstract images of ocean waves or clouds drifting across the skies. But I also didn’t want to show actual patients. For one thing, it might have been difficult to avoid being invasive, or to find willing patients. For another, I wanted viewers to be able to imagine themselves—ourselves—as the dying person. I needed a balance between harsh realism and vague superficialities.
When I found a doll dressed in a hospital gown, one whose torso unzips to show her organs, I knew I was halfway there: I had something solid and real to represent a dying patient, but still metaphorical enough to be a stand-in for any of us. Then Tom Bartels, the videographer and editor of the video, proposed using an animation filter to tell the story.
The resulting video has an almost whimsical feel. But my hope is that it also conveys a useful sense of what it might be like to die, and about the very physical process of dy