There's a lot of openness to feelings, a lot of touching. And there's a real direct effort to deal with death on an individual basis. You learn to accept death as natural for everyone, and you accept that. Our lives are stories, really. Relationships and stories.
All stories have endings.
When someone dies peacefully, the w ay, they want to because they' were able to orchestrate it, that's a happy ending. Learning to look at my patients' deaths this way is how I avoid burning out. I go to the homes of my patients when they are dying. Usually patients and their friends and families want to show me that this person is more than the disease, that they have an entire life. People want to show me who they are and who they were.