Section 1

A bedside

The oldest medical question, asked at the end. What is care now?

A bedside. A body whose corridor is narrowing. A family in the room. A clinician with options that could buy a few more days. Or weeks. Or months.

The oldest medical question, asked at the end. What is care now?

Every reader has been in this room, or will be. The body in the bed may be a parent. A partner. A brother or a sister. A child. Your own.

The clinician’s options may be hard ones. Another surgery. Another round of treatment. Another resuscitation. Or they may be gentle ones. Palliative care holds the corridor’s edge at a level the body can still read, without a cost it cannot bear.

The family in the room may be united or divided. Present or absent. Behind the patient’s own reading, or pushing against it. What care is at the closing is the question this chapter takes up.

The corridor is the range of states a body can keep running in. The corridor is finite. Every body crosses out of it in the end.

This chapter sets out the shape of a dignified exit. It names the authority the person holds over the conditions of that crossing. It names when the decision to exit is the person’s own. And it names the role the larger structure plays at the closing: the family, the clinician, the hospital, the people around the bed.

It is the last of the five chapters on the body. Keeping a body running. Editing a body before its person can choose. Authority over your own mind. Extending a body. And now the closing.

It is written in the register of the bedside, in a form a clinician can read. The personal weight is held elsewhere. The artist’s own losses. What does not close when one life closes. A later volume of the work carries that.

This chapter stands on the one interior: the awareness in me is the awareness in you. The full argument is in Ø Dissolutions, Chapter Six. The page One Awareness on the wall is about it alone: the420code.org/one-awareness/

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 9 — End-of-Life Care and the Right to Exit. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/09-end-of-life-care-and-the-right-to-exit/. The film, The structure’s unpaid debt: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-9.1 to APP-9.5.