In 2019, a young doctor named Blair Bigham wrote a story for The Walrus about an aspect of his medical training that left him uncomfortable: establishing the official end of life. “As technologies and medicines have grown in sophistication,” he wrote, “the line between alive and dead has become more difficult to determine for some.” House of Anansi, the publisher that produces The Walrus Books literary imprint, commissioned Bigham to expand his observations into a book. An adapted essay from that new title, Death Interrupted: How Modern Medicine Is Complicating the Way We Die, is our cover story this month.
Over the past few years, we’ve all had to become, if not exactly comfortable with death, more aware of its place in the life cycle. It’s around us, in the nearly 6.5 million lives lost to the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, more than 43,000 here in Canada. Concurrent societal issues like the opioid crisis and medical assistance in dying, or MAID, have also kept the subject in the news. I’d be lying if I said my own relatively mild cases of COVID-19 didn’t trigger in me a renewed appreciation that good health is conditional on circumstances. Indeed, one of the underacknowledged burdens of the pandemic has been the need to go about our routines—school, grocery runs, time with friends and family—with a sharpened awareness that time is finite. To truly live with COVID-19 is a big flex.
