A short podcast transcript excerpt discussing why clinicians and the public often avoid the word “death,” exploring the emotional weight of the term and how medical training and cultural views of death-as-failure shape clinicians’ communication. The speakers note that death is linguistically heavy and that clinicians may lack training for end-of-life conversations, leading to euphemistic or indirect language.
Do the doctors and the palliative care specialists, are they avoiding the D word because there's some weird stigma? Is the word death or die? Is it too aggressive?
It is a big word, one syllable that lands like an anvil. But it really. It holds a lot of truths that many of us seek to avoid. And I think doctors and medical professionals are also human. You know, I think that on some level, there isn't enough training in hospitals or training in medical school about dealing with people nearing the end of life. I think that oftentimes folks want to have saved the person, they want the medicine to work, and maybe it feels like a failure of some sort. I think as long as we think of death as the opposite of health or we think of death as a failure in some way, the folks that are meant to cure folks will always have a hard time with it because.
We speak around it, right? Like, I'm sorry for your father's passing.
He's no longer with us when we speak in euphemisms. We also run the risk of continuing to pass on our death avoidance and our death phobia and culture, particularly when talking to children. There was a guy I talked to not that long ago who told me that when his grandmother died, they told him that grandma had gone to sleep. He was terrified to sleep for years. He was seven when she died, terrified to go to sleep because he thought he wouldn't come back either, you know, thereby reinforcing the idea that it's something that we don't talk about, something that we don't address, something that we put over there. We don't say somebody died. We say they went to heaven or they went away for a long time. You won't be seeing her anymore. We. We cause more confusion and we reiterate death phobia in our culture.
