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Articles

Dying At The Right Time

Morgan Rempel wonders whether there is a good time to die.

Not long ago, while waiting for a haircut at the barber shop, I found myself thumbing through a well-worn copy of Time magazine from March 12, 2007. The magazine’s closing piece, ‘The Fine Art of Dying Well’ by Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer got me thinking, not only about the examples of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths he mentions, but about something I had read only days before by Friedrich Nietzsche on that very topic.

Krauthammer

Focusing on several famous deaths from the relatively recent past, Krauthammer’s article points to a handful of factors that come into play in determining whether a particular exit from the stage of life deserves to be characterized as a ‘good death’. After quickly applauding the ‘good death’ of American writer Art Buchwald (who died of kidney failure in 2007, mocking his looming death to the very end), Krauthammer moves swiftly to his central hypotheses: that ‘dying well’ is very often simply “a matter of luck.”

One way luck can play a significant role in the attainment or undermining of a ‘good death’ has to do with timing.

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