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What Bedside Confessions of the Dying Reveal
And how to have those difficult end-of-life conversations
“Hey, Doc, aren’t you headed home?” a patient asked me one evening as I was making final rounds during my weekly rotation on what we call hospital service at the Mayo Clinic. I was slotted as the attending physician several weeks a year, and with a top-notch nursing team and residents and fellows, we covered about 40 patients at any given time, all at the end of their lives. My specialty was cancer and hospice and palliative care.
His night light was on. His skeletal head and neck sank deeply into a nest of pillows. This diminutive figure, a 90-year-old man from a small town in Missouri who had been admitted to the hospital with advanced lung cancer, wanted to talk. I wanted to listen.
“You know I was with the engineers on those islands in the Pacific,” his story of service in World War II began. “Our battalion built hangars and water systems and sewers on those little spits of land. I loved it. ’Course, I was just out of high school when the war started. We all signed up, you know.”
Between coughing spells, he told me about how he gained skills in home construction. He envisioned how cities would have housing booms once “that damned war” was over. He foresaw the baby boomers. And there he was…
