Conventional wisdom says, “A good death is at home with my family gathered around me.”
An alternative view says, “I don’t want to die at home.”
How many times have we seen in an obituary, “He died peacefully at home with his family gathered around him.” Families wear this as a badge of honor. They provided the best of care and met the patient’s wishes to remain at home.
Home is generally considered the preferred place to die. For the first time in generations, more people are dying at home than in the hospital*. I have seen some studies that consider dying at home, as opposed to dying in the hospital, as a “good outcome.”
“Not so fast, my friend.”
“Not so fast, my friend,” as Lee Corso would say on College Game Day. Many people die away from home by choice. As I said in a previous blog, there are some people who just feel more comfortable dying in the hospital. Some families do not want to live in a home where a family member died.
I have a friend who is in his 70s and his preference is to die away from home. He is in a second marriage, this time to a widow. He does not want to put his wife through the caregiving burden again.
Besides, he told me, he has so far paid for long term care insurance for years and would hate for all that money to go to waste. With the insurance, he is prepared financially to live for years in assisted living or a nursing home. “I will not put her through that again,” he said.
*See a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, “Where Americans Die — Is There Really ‘No Place Like Home’?”
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Chaplain Hank Dunn is the author of Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Feeding Tubes, Palliative Care, Comfort Measures and the Patient with a Serious Illness and Light in the Shadows. Together they have sold over 4 million copies. You can purchase his books at hankdunn.com or on Amazon.
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Cover Photo by Zac Gudakov on Unsplash
