On Mortality and Meaning

The eighth episode in our Wisdom Season

Image by David Yellen, © All Rights Reserved.

We are strange creatures. It is hard for us to speak about, or let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, western medicine has gradually moved away from its understanding of death as a failure — where care stops with a terminal diagnosis. Hospice has moved, from something rare to something expected. And yet advances in technology have made it ever harder for physicians and patients to make a call to stop fighting death — often at the expense of the quality of this last time of life. Meanwhile, there is a new longevity industry which resists the very notion of decline, much less finitude. 

Fascinatingly, the simple question which transformed the surgeon Atul Gawande’s life and practice of medicine is this: What does a good day look like? As he has come to see, standing reverently before our mortality is an exercise in more intricately inhabiting why we want to be alive. This conversation evokes both grief and hope, sadness at so many deaths — including our species-level losses to Covid — that have not allowed for this measure of care. Yet it also includes very actionable encouragement towards the agency that is there to claim in our mortal odysseys ahead.

Or listen wherever podcasts are found.

Atul Gawande's writing for The New Yorker and his books have been read by millions, most famously Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He currently serves as Assistant Administrator for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He previously practiced general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston — and was a professor at both the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 

A Special Offering

An impassioned plea, a yearning for connection — the poem U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón wrote when she says all language failed her. Take in Ada's reading of her piece, “The End of Poetry” — and hear her read more of her work in the On Being episode, “To Be Made Whole.”

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In the World

For Listening and Watching

Krista with Shirley Leung: Say More podcast (via the Boston Globe)

A personal, practical discussion about burnout and uncertainty and how befriending reality, in all its glory and its messiness, can help us live with our unease. Silence and stillness are needed for us to do this inner work, and Krista talks about how she finds quiet in her own life. Listen to their conversation wherever podcasts are found.  

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