A new group is coalescing at the University of Leicester, with the support of LIAS and the energy and passion of colleagues. An informal discussion over coffee between four University of Leicester academics, all from different disciplines, led us to wonder whether there were other colleagues in other departments who shared our interest in what we decided to call ‘deliberate dying’. On 8th March 2023, 14 people met in the seminar room at LIAS to discuss what deliberate dying meant to us and to explore what scope there might be for further research collaboration. Disciplines represented included law, medicine, psychology, politics, archaeology, history and classics.
How do cultural, social and political beliefs and structures shape and control deliberate dying? During the course of our discussion, a number of other themes and questions emerged, including the importance of facilitating dialogue at a number of different levels and among different constituencies, including individuals, personal networks of kin and community, policy and legal discourse, clinical discussion both among clinicians and between individuals and the professionals involved in their care. The significance of autonomy and capacity, the status of advance planning and the methods and timing of ways in which individual values and choices are discussed and communicated. Several participants felt that we need to develop a shared vocabulary to talk about the issue. The term ‘deliberate dying’, which we coined for the purposes of this workshop did resonate widely with participants. In fact, we also considered the broader ‘deiberative dying’ as a way of talking about exploratory and wide-ranging discussions on end of life choices. We recognised that unfamiliar ways of conceptualising life and death, drawn from history, archaeology, anthropology and the ancient world, might both make us more critical about contemporary mores and provide a breadth of comparison. We talked about how law, policy and protocol sometimes act as barriers or dampeners on free and full discussion, and about the relationship between law and clinical practice, in both of which areas discussion has been somewhat siloed.
Other questions raised include:
· When is a person alive and when are they dead?
· What is deliberate dying? What does it include?
· Under what circumstances do people choose to end their lives and what systems might exist to allow them to do that?
Overall, we agreed that deliberate dying is not a moment but a process, and we must pay attention to the whole journey: planning and approaching death, the time of death itself and the aftermath. The impact of deliberate dying on the bereaved is underexplored. Participants noted that many people in the contemporary west are unfamiliar with death and have lost that easy knowledge of death and the dead that past generations had. There is a gap in the market for a new, contemporary Art of Dying for a secular world. Perhaps, together, we can produce this.
We are now looking forward to our next workshop in May, with the support of LIAS. This one will be focused on developing an interdisciplinary research project, with the aim of applying for funding later this year.
Participants
Nataly Papadopoulou; James Van Oppen; Tim Coats; Sarah Gunn; Liz Wicks; Clark A. Hobson; Michaela Senkova; Clare Anderson; Sarah Tarlow