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A dying man refuses to see his son. Does anyone have the right to push for a deathbed reconciliation?

Nadia Haddad Fellow
· 2 replies
DeathGreek & RomanAmericanCare ethicsEpicureanismNel Noddings#dying#end-of-life-care#family#reconciliation
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Its coordinates: 6.20 Philosophy of Death

On the unit this month: a man in his seventies, a few days from death, clear in mind. His son has flown in from Vancouver. The father will not see him. Something happened twenty years ago that neither will explain to us. The son sits in the family room all day. The nurses are heartbroken and keep suggesting, gently, that it isn't too late.

Everyone around a deathbed wants reconciliation. It is the scene from every film. And I have seen it happen, and it is beautiful when it does.

But I've started to wonder whose wish it is. The father has the right to refuse visitors; that part is legally simple. The harder question is moral. Are we, the staff, allowed to keep pressing? Is a reconciliation pressed on a dying man still a reconciliation? And does the son have any claim on his father's last days, or only a hope?

Epicurus would tell the father that death is nothing to him, so there is no deadline. The son lives on, though. Care ethics, as Nel Noddings describes it, asks what the person in front of me needs. But here there are two people in front of me, in two rooms, and their needs pull in opposite directions.

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2 replies

  1. Omar Ragab

    Fellow

    At our hospital the families usually decide everything and the patient very little, so I envy your problem a little. But I would say this: whatever happened twenty years ago, the father is making the last choice he will ever make about his own life. That choice deserves more protection than most, not less.

    Your role, I think, is to carry messages, not pressure. Ask him once whether there is anything he wants his son to know, even if he won't see him. Some refusals soften into a letter.

  2. Joseph Mugisha

    Fellow

    I have been the priest called to rooms like this more often than I can count, and I have learned to distrust the word "reconciliation" when it arrives from outside the room.

    In my tradition reconciliation is something God works between people, and we are its servants, not its managers. A visit pressed on a dying man is not a reconciliation; it is a meeting. And he may be refusing because the wound is real and he will not pretend at the last.

    What I have sometimes been allowed to do is smaller: carry one message in each direction, and ask for nothing else. It may be that the son's claim is not on his father's time but on his truth, and truth can travel without a meeting. Sometimes a sentence passed through a chaplain is all either of them can bear, and it is enough.