Facing Death

Abstract

Having outlined some of the ways in which dying has been understood ‘from the outside’ or by those not in this situation themselves, the aim of this chapter is to let some people who are dying describe their experience in their own words, as far as possible. It should not be surprising that amongst those who write about their experience of facing death there are those who are writers by profession — journalists or novelists. I draw here on the books by Oscar Moore, who died aged 36 years in 1996 following nearly three years with AIDS (Moore 1996), and of Ruth Picardie, who died of cancer in 1997, aged 33 years (Picardie 1998). Both were journalists and both wrote of their experiences in a national newspaper column; their last column being, in each case, about a month before they died. I also refer to a newspaper article (Brodkey 1996) by the American novelist Harold Brodkey, who died in 1996, also as a result of AIDS.