In the eyes of a sincere priest, a doctor may look as if he is missing a very important thing.
Since the doctor of modern times has to fight death, he can be considered first to run the risk of seeing Grim Reaper as an absolute enemy and coming up with every conceivable life-saving measure, so that when these are finally in vain, he might (have) miss(ed) the shift to the (already started) dying process of a human being.
Space between saving life and not saving life?
If there is no space, one could say that a doctor is situationally unprepared for having "lost a patient". He might think that "he has failed all along the line".
Let's say, he lacks the priestly attitude of doing death as a daily business, who is friendly with the reality that death happens all around. Since our fictional doctor is so terribly busy saving lives, he has forgotten to ask himself how he deals with it if this does not come about.
Would you not want to catch the poor doctor and tell him that he will have to give Father Death a few percent? Who lets this man pass seamlessly from one attitude to the other and the unfortunate man doesn't keep apologising that he "didn't succeed" (either inwardly or outwardly). Possibly even seeing his nightly sleep robbed of "his" losses.
Indeed, the doctor, when such things happen, could exchange his white coat for a black robe
and distribute some sacraments in harmony with the dying process and offer comfort to the relatives. The relatives, who would not have to endure a guilt-ridden doctor in their vicinity, could take chances to get away from their own life-saving fantasy at any cost and could breathe a sigh of relief to meet someone who is not obsessed with the idea that it is in "his power" to act over life and death.
A paradoxical intervention in a doctor's personal death statistics could be the question:
What percentage of deaths per months would you allow yourselves personally?
What this method does is make it difficult to think this scenario through without laughing a little irritably. Since the question hovers in the room: if he has set ten per cent, for example, will he then, not fight for the lives before he reaches the mark and up from the eleven per cent mark onwards, starts fighting?
Silly questions are an excellent method to reveal a paradox
The doc cannot answer this!
The very realization that this is a question impossible to answer gives room for a different attitude. Gives ease for different answers which finally can pass the door of imagination after the tight grip of "no alternatives" is no longer there.
If "fighting" is not the opposite of "accepting" what then are they?
How can you look at them differently? What would you answer?
What if the doc indeed hung a black robe in his locker? To serve him as an anchor, a fabric reminder that this doctor can be a companion for the dying.
It would be a repetition training to remember, every moment of opening the locker, wouldn't it? The sight of the black robe would make a difference in the daily routine. There would be the possibility that this doctor, where he is situationally open to the possibility of dying at a human's bedside, would be able to allow the presence of mind to be appropriately practiced.
Would that mean that this doctor, instead of accepting death, now presupposes it? Of course not.
That would be about as stupid as if, for example, one did not expect death from very old people, but demanded it.
Bye bye for now.
Photo by Jan Laugesen on Unsplash