You quickly learn, as a palliative care doctor, that the moments after someone’s death can be disarming, paradoxical and deeply unnerving. The deceased – if briefly – remains warm, infused with blood and vitality. As you clasp their hand, you can feel it cooling. These are the remnants of life, physically, awfully, ebbing away. The enormity of these moments has never been captured more poignantly than by Wilfred Owen in his 1918 poem Futility. A soldier, recently killed, looks so alive to Owen that he cannot believe the warmth of the sun will not wake him: “Think how it wakes the seeds– / Woke once the clays of a cold star. / Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides / Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?”
I have thought of those lines many times as the tragic case of Archie Battersbee has played out, often loudly and furiously, across mainstream and social media. For Archie’s parents have faced something that would have been unimaginable to Owen, who was killed in action in 1918. They live in an era in which the medical advances of the 20th century enable patients to be medically and legally dead and yet spend days, weeks and even months in the no man’s land of mechanical life support, looking for all the world as though they are merely sleeping. Some people have lashed out online at Archie’s parents, Paul Battersbee and Hollie Dance, pouring scorn on their comments and actions. But until we have faced such a horror ourselves, how on earth can we presume to judge those who do?
