We’ve seen it so many times. A young, handsome man rushed into the emergency room with a gunshot wound. A flurry of white coats racing the clock: CPR, the heart zapper, the order for a scalpel. Stat! Then finally, the flatline.
This is Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider’s biggest pet peeve. Where are the TV scripts about the elderly grandmothers dying of heart failure at home? What about an episode on the daughter still grieving her father’s fatal lung cancer, ten years later?
“Acute, violent death is portrayed many, many, many times more than a natural death,” says Ungerleider, an internal medicine doctor and founder of End Well, a nonprofit focused on shifting the American conversation around death.
Don’t even get her started on all the miraculous CPR recoveries where people’s eyes flutter open and they pop out of the hospital the next day.
All these television tropes are causing real harm, she says, and ignore the complexity and choices people face at the end of life.
My dad died 10 years ago and I still grieve for him. Not all the time, obviously, but I’ll watch a movie that I think he would like or I’ll read an article that I wish I could talk to him about and I grieve. He died when my daughter was four. She was asking about him the other day and I grieved again talking about him. I had to hold back tears. A couple of years ago, I watched a TV adaptation of an off-Broadway musical he loved and I was crying almost the entire time despite it being (mostly) a comedy. I’m fighting back tears right now.
For that matter, I still grieve my first dog who died 15 years ago.
I don’t know that grief ever entirely goes away.
I’m sorry about your father.
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Yeah, I totally understand. Like the musical. It’s about a gay man dealing with his former wife and child and also his first new boyfriend after coming out. And it’s really funny. My dad (not because he could relate, he was CisHet) absolutely loved the music and listened to the cast album all the time.
And I just watched the entire time with tears streaming down my face.
Wow. I can relate to you and Nate’s conversation so closely. I lost my dad to brain cancer 2 years ago. We both enjoyed discussing the latest discoveries in astronomy. Now, I don’t follow anything about it. But every time I come across new jwst image on here, my eyes start leaking.
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