Letting go of a loved one: When roses matter more than bread

When it comes to care and letting go, we have to consider not just what sustains life but all the things that make life worth living.

- Tan Kok Yang

"My mother is a fighter, she has fought all her life and she will continue to fight for me! Please do something, doctor!" A distressed daughter said this to me as her mother, Madam A, lay desperately ill in the intensive care ward. I had operated on Mdm A just two days earlier for gangrenous intestines. The patient was overwhelmed with infection. The machines were barely able to bring oxygen to her tissues and the medications that we used to support her life had made all her fingers and toes turn bluish black.

I struggled to help the daughter understand the likely futility of our medical care. The bond between this daughter and her mother was clearly very strong and it broke my heart to dash her hopes. Mdm A was a single mother and had struggled through great hardship to raise her child. The daughter had gone on to do well in life and now her dreams of giving her mother a life she never had, some recompense for the sacrifices she made, were being shredded by the spectre of death. As she cried, I noticed the barely conscious Mdm A had tears welling in her eyes too.

What is it about death that is so difficult to accept? I do not presume to know what it feels like to face death as I have not had that experience. But to have a loved one die can be a frightening experience as well.

What is so frightening about death for those left behind is the finality of it and the dissonance of seeing how everything continues after a death and yet, for that person who died, time has stopped. With that, gone are the opportunities to do even the simplest of things with your loved one, to chat, to spend time doing nothing in particular together.