A touching glimpse into the mystery of death | David Galler | TEDxChristchurch

[Music] that's that's we it's weirdly sort of appropriate to finish the fabulous day that we've had with a talk about death and dying about you and me and the inevitability of our own passing but actually this is not so much a talk about our stopping it's more about us starting and how by embracing the mystery of our life and our dear and by coming to terms with our own mortality we can live a fuller life full of purpose and full of love this is a photograph of my parents it's only a wedding day in 1952 and Tel Aviv and Israel both of my parents lost their parents and most of their families in the Holocaust my mother survived her child and a schvitz and the death march that followed and my father five years fighting with the Polish army based out of London I know for them and I suspect for you and I know for myself that I came to this place to this world imbued with the spirit of my ancestors and in everything that I do and in each moment of time I add to my own present in my future and that when it's my turn to go if I am lucky it will be those that love me my children perhaps I hope who will carry me into their future and perhaps that's the best we can hope for when I was thinking about this talk I didn't think so much about the future I thought much more about the past and in particular some of the enduring truths and far katoki of our First Nations and many of you will be familiar with this Mason jerries model of health and wellness for Marty too far a top afar it's a holistic model that encompasses much more than just physical well-being it includes the well-being of the family the mind and importantly the spirit and other another talkie Hey aha Tamia Nui o T ow hey Tonya Tonya Tonya - hey tangata what's the most important thing in the world it is people it is people it is people and one more camera can worry that that we walk into the future facing backwards or as søren kierkegaard said we understand backwards but we are forced to live our life forwards that sense that the future is somewhat unwritten and that no there are clues to it from our past these kinds of things have been quite helpful to me and my sort of no journey through medicine and I think they might be helpful for us to consider as we go through this talk which is I think more about living than dying to tell you the truth now when I was incredibly young I thought I would live forever I didn't talk about death or dying much I didn't consider it nor Elna Sand suffering and in fact if I was ever to be threatened by something like that as it happened for my ancestors and the time of the ancient Pharaoh's the Angel of Death would pass over my house and I would be spared actually I don't believe that anymore my first encounter with the death and dying process though came at medical school when I was a student and I still remember the profound sense of disbelief that I had when I looked down at those tiny dark nuclei inside those cancer cells so far away at the end of that microscope and my sense of disbelief that they could bring us down and that terrible process that is that the progressive weight loss and fatigue that inexorable turning up of our toes until we die oh my god Here I am at the late afternoon of my medical career and I still actually don't understand how that happens but I've come to realize that I don't need to understand that I just need to accept that it does another photograph of my parents at 1986 this time taken in the back garden of my home in London my father died in Wellington four years after this photograph was taken he was 77 years old I was 34 and just recently returned to New Zealand was working at Auckland Hospital before I moved to Middlemore where I now work although my father's death was not unexpected it rocked me in all sorts of different ways first of all that sense of disbelief that he was he was dead and could be gone forever a terrible sense of guilt because I could have been a better son to him a sense of sadness for not knowing more about his extraordinary life and that nagging regret for all those things left unsaid but perhaps mostly and perhaps selfishly the thing that really struck me was that this was the first time I had to really face up the ephemeral nature of life and start coming to terms with my own mortality the sight of my father's body in that funeral home that soon after became a car yard still haunts me that look on his face and death one he never had in life the funeral he had in the freezing rain at Makkah bar on the south coast of Wellington the calming effect of our ritual the singing of the Kaddish the horror of the drip drip drip of the rain into that puddle in the corner of his grave the thud of the red clay on the coffin those things stayed with me for months and for years until I could turn away from my fear of death and start to concentrate on living a purposeful life we are all of us a speck in this planet in this universe we exist for a millisecond in a vast expanse of time and if the past has anything to go by time will continue into a future that we barely can foresee or comprehend into that continuance many of us have come and all of us will go because life is zero-sum game if there's one thing we are good at us human beings we're good at dying we hit that target 100% of the time so if we come we will go you know and as sad as that might be and as much as our loved ones try to hold on to us in time too we will eventually become increasingly lost from them and that pattern will continue and continue until we are a species no more perhaps because we have no habitable place now I am an intensive care doctor I work with the living although many of my patients are skirting their own death I work with their families and I work with their friends and invariably these people face their situation were the strength and resilience and a dignity that is absolutely outstanding but too often I see the same sense of of regret sadness and disbelief that I felt at the death of my father the ICU is a crucible a place where there's a great swirl of emotion and intensity deep reflection the ebb and flow of all sorts of different things conflict and resolution and we are there with these people a temporary gift and their lives to guide them to help them to understand to judge their pace to each them forward and whether their loved one lives or dies our role is to keep them together to make them better to help them to know and for that and for them to go away knowing and to live a good and purposeful life so there are so many stories it's really hard to know where to begin last week a young woman going about her everyday work suddenly looked pained put a hand up to her head and drop to the ground deeply unconscious the cause a cerebral hemorrhage from an undiagnosed aneurysm by the time she reached hospital she had fixed and dilated pupils eighteen hours later she was declared brain dead the next morning her lungs her heart her liver and her kidneys were being transplanted into five complete strangers in a moment people's lives are turned upside down and inside out families and friends are changed forever the longest day and night of their lives a journey that is so deep these families are really magnificent and we are there alongside them and together we see the light as clear as it can ever be and it's their affirmation of life in the face of the darkness of death these moments are so profound they are indescribable and to be a witness to that kind of stuff is just awesome intensive care doctors are often called to assess critically ill patients at all times of the day and night people that we've never met before and increasingly now the frail and the elderly when when I was a young doctor I felt under enormous pressure to intervene the families were there their friends all waiting expecting the doctor to come to make sense of the situation their own and to make things better and when I was young it was really tough you know I just felt they wanted me to do stuff and I did stuff so I intervened I did things I pulled the trigger on all those things that I was trained to do but I know better now and circumstances like that I spend much more time taking stock of talking to those families listening to them to learn and understand more about that patient the life that they have and what they value and when you do that in every case the right treatment path emerges and invariably it's to do less rather than to do more a while back I spent quite a bit of time working and saw more where I met my friend Mary now Mary came into the hospital with a life-threatening infection was close to death according to her daughter Mary was already quite frail she was 78 and in the younger life though she had met she had run and looked after the family business now managed by the daughter it was a small hotel down by the port and our pier was quite nice views over the harbour to watch the ships from the second floor balconies and in her younger days Mary would scoot up those stairs and do the things that she needed to do but as she got older she started to take the elevator but in the last 18 months or so Mary was pretty well confined to the front disc but Mary enjoyed her life and according to a daughter she knew how to life and really importantly she knew how she wanted to so we had a discussion and we decided that we would take Mary up to the little ICU there and we did really simple things as well as we possibly could we gave her oxygen we gave her fluids we gave us some antibiotics a few drugs here and there and we fine-tuned things always trying to keep an eye on her comfort making sure she was comfortable and we decided to wait and see and see which way she turned 24 hours later she's a little bit better 48 hours later she was in a chair ten days later shoes at home and here she is on the day of her 80th birthday two years later working with the frail and the elderly is one of the great challenges for modern medicine it's more about the art than it is about the science it's about how do we customize all that we know and all that we can do to the individual needs of that really difficult group it's about treating softly on that line between treatment and torture and invariably it's about doing less rather than more as robust and strong as we are here today with our lives so full and so much already achieved and so much more to look forward to in the future it's hard to believe that one day we'll be gone not just for a holiday or ducking out for a smoke or a cup of coffee I mean gone for good there are lots of people who just can't get their heads around that and they put their their sort of eggs and the afterlife basket now I I don't think that's such a smart move because I think that just reduces the intensity of their lives and they're here and now what is the time now at some to five plus six on the 28th of October 2017 I reckon by now a hundred and seven billion people have come and gone from this place you would have thought that if there was an afterlife we would have heard about it think about this all of those letters emails and texts stacked up against the post office door on death side you would have thought that one of them would have made it through the crack from the darkness to the life a letter from a dead mother to a grieving child from a dead child to a grieving mother but no I don't believe there's ever been a postcard and I've not heard from my mother my mother who wanted to know everything about me all of the time David she would say are you happy David will you be home for dinner would you like me to put some food aside for you do you still like a filter fish if there was one thing that could transcend death surely it would be the anxiety of my mother but no no not a word so it seems to me that life is very much about the here and now it's about earthly minds and our earthly bodies living on this our heavenly earth here's my mother this photo on the 3rd of May 2009 that's her 80th birthday and it's taken at the Wellesley club in McGuinness E Street and Wellington she died two years later I was with her during her final illness and looked after her at her home in Wellington for the last couple of months of her of that of that terrible cancer she hung on as survivors do unwilling to give up until in a moment of surrender death came for her my mother like people so close to death maintained a radiance and a warmth all the way to the end and suddenly it was gone his spirit they stated 20 grams of Earth took off like a bird a little while later her body was cremated and awhile later her ashes were interred in my father's grave and Nakada the spirit of my mother and the spirit of my father live on in me I know that and I can feel that now you might say I am a man of science but I am also not because I'm just like you and none of us are immune from the mystery of death it will always overwhelm anything that we pretend to know I had a patient once who had a near-death experience she described it to me like this the colors were really really bright my eyesight was sharp I looked down on my battered body and I heard a voice and it said it's not your time so I went back death is such a mystery a child on a ghost train the one the one big thing we will have to face one by one and all alone 22 years passed between the death of my father and the death of my mother and during that time I was forced to grow up I learned a lot about life and I learned a bit about death for me life is about us it's about you it's about me it's about us together it's about how we value each other and how we look after each other it's also about how we look after the environment that sustains us we come into this world and viewed but with the spirits of our ancestors and everything that we do and in each moment we add to our presence and to our future and if we are lucky will be our children who all those who love us that will carry us into theirs so the question for each of us is this how will I choose to live and make the most of my one unique precious life thank you [Applause] you [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 73,309

Rating: 4.6246915 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Death

Id: 0jYlB6ueoYw

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2017