Pat Arnow is a photographer, writer, and more lately, a cartoonist in New York. She often writes and draws stories about death.Her artwork “A Death in Chicago, 1972: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and My Family” appears in the Spring 2019 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
A dad has cancer. He decides not to undergo a risky, possibly ineffective operation that might save him. His family supports his decision. He goes home to die.
Karen Dukess writes about this in “Day One of Dying” (Fall 2016) as if those choices were an everyday thing.
Well they are—now.
In this lovely memoir of a beloved father, it is striking to me how things have changed from when my dad faced terminal cancer in the early 1970s. Then the rule was maximum intervention no matter what the prognosis. No one would quibble with doctors. People died in hospitals.
That’s how the story begins in my comic, “A Death in Chicago, 1972: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and My Family” (Spring 2019). As my father lay dying in a hospital bed, he received a remarkable visit from Kübler-Ross, who had recently written On Death and Dying. She allowed my dad to say out loud how he wanted to stop painful treatments and go home to die.
My father’s homecoming came on the cusp of change for the dying and for those close to them. We started talking about death. The hospice movement grew. There is help for what are still the hard and sad days of dying.
Yet so much is the same including the moments of grace. I recognized this lesson, a gift from our dads as Dukess describes it:
“Day 6 of Dying—I am becoming a better listener. Really, what can you say?”
Pat Arnow is a photographer, writer, and more lately, a cartoonist in New York. She often writes and draws stories about death.With “A Death in Chicago, 1972,” she tells the story of her father’s dying, which involved Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, because it’s a personal story from a time of momentous change in the way we think about death. Her artwork “A Death in Chicago, 1972: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and My Family” appears in the Spring 2019 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
© 2019 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine