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A SHORT TIME AGO MY FATHER died, having spent far too many of his last years in pain and degeneration. Although I had expected his death and tried to prepare myself for it, when the time came it naturally turned out that you really can't prepare. A week afterward I found myself back at work, bludgeoned by emotions that swirled around a numb core of unreality--a feeling of disconnection from the events that had just taken place on the other side of the continent, of disbelief that it was really him frozen in that nightmare of stillness. The members of my laboratory were solicitous. One, a medical student, asked me how I was doing, and I replied, "Well, today it seems as if I must have imagined it all." "That makes sense," she said. "Don't forget about. DABDA."
DABDA. In 1969 the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published a landmark book, On Death and Dying. Drawing on her research with terminally ill people and their families, she described the process whereby people mourn the death of others and, when impending, of themselves. Most of us, she observed, go through a fairly well defined sequence of stages. First we deny the death is happening. Then we become angry at the unfairness of it all. We pass through a stage of irrational bargaining, with the doctors, with God: just let this not be fatal and I will change my ways. Please, just wait until Christmas. There follows a stage of depression and, if one is fortunate, the final chapter, serene acceptance. The sequence is not ironclad; individuals may skip certain stages, experience them out of order or regress to earlier ones. DABDA, moreover, is generally thought to give a better description of one's own preparation for dying than of one's mourning the demise of someone else. Nevertheless, there is a broadly recognized consistency in the overall pattern of mourning: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I was stuck at stage one, right on schedule.
Brevity is the soul of DABDA. A few years ago I saw that point brilliantly dramatized on television--on, of all programs, The Simpsons. It was the episode in which Homer, the father, accidentally eats a poisonous fish and is told he has twenty-four hours to live....