Elly McCabe

“Death will come for us all and yet medicine still sees it as a defeat. No wonder that legal physician-assisted suicide has caused such an uproar within medical circles. Research has shown that even in jurisdictions where it is legal, confusion about its ethics, processes and procedures abound. Why? Because physician-assisted suicide allies the doctor with their enemy, namely death. Health professionals generally don’t seem to have the training and skills to assist in the dying process and most don’t appear to want them. Research has shown a strong connection between the death attitudes of health professionals and the quality of end-of-life care that they provide. For example, nurses low in death acceptance tend to have negative attitudes towards end-of-life care and cultivate poorer relationships with terminal patients. Death anxiety among healthcare providers negatively affects their attitudes towards family members of the dying. Further, death anxiety has been shown to stop relevant health professionals from initiating discussions about advance care directives. This, of course, makes it extremely difficult to ensure that the wishes of the dying are adhered to when the moment comes.”
― Rachel E. Menzies, Mortals: How the fear of death shaped human society

“A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“Oh, I'm burning! I wish I were out of doors! I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free... and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed?”
― Emily Bronte

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
― Mark Twain