Road accidents and heart attacks are there to remind us that we can shut down at any time. There are between 50000 and 60000 sudden deaths per year in France due to sudden heart failure. Sometimes, when we perceive its beats, we momentarily become aware of this possibility. We realize for a short time, or the time of the anomaly, that everything we hold dear, all our projects, our links with friends, family, can suddenly be severed for a beat of through.

Sometimes, it is up to the doctor to scare the individual who does not take care of his body: the awareness of his fragility can improve the compliance of a treatment or the adoption of better resolutions.

Le cancer never brings a brutal death: it is only a dire omen, an alarm signal, a black cloud announcing the storm. When he is present, says Claude Bersay, “ it’s always late, sometimes too late »: It propels the patient into another dimension, on another axis which would have suddenly deviated from the main axis at the doctor’s announcement. It imprints the fear of death. But even when he is away at home, we sometimes meet him during a meeting and he reminds us that everyone ” runs the risk of being hit tomorrow and may have been hit since yesterday “. The fear is legitimate: it is a frequent disease (1 in 4 people is affected) which kills one in two patients.

There is probably no better fear of death lab than a cancer practice. Claude Bersay testifies: “ we see people torn from their routine, from their hopes by a tragedy. They are trapped and they are struggling: it is a kind of test bed of psychology: denial, refusal of care, willingness to fight, asking for multiple opinions from other doctors or even charlatans, anger , despair “. Advances in medicine mean that now those whom surgery cannot save no longer die within a year: they live for several years in the hope of a possible cure but always in the shadow of death. 

The fear of death has long remained silent. There is a certain taboo around death, as much on the side of the patient as on the side of the family and the nursing staff. But, by the time the dying realize that they don’t have much longer, many would like to talk about what awaits them, the fear that paralyzes them. However, according to Claude Bersay, they have the feeling of having in front of them people who are not ready to hear them… ” It is the living and not the dying who are afraid to speak of death ».

Collective management of death is a phenomenon common to all human societies. For more than 50 years, and the other species of the genus homo were probably doing the same, man has buried his dead according to funeral rites. ” There is hardly any archaic group, no matter how primitive, that abandons their dead or abandons them without rite. », Said Edgar Morin. Today, however, we are witnessing an erosion of rites. The dying person is more alone than ever, he is abandoned to his fate in establishments planned for the end of his life: ” the agony is in many ways more cruel than before and the dying person is no longer alone because everything has become mechanical and soulless »Remarks Claude Bersay. We stayed at home, surrounded by our family, we received the last sacraments, we regulated our spiritual and temporal affairs. In short, we kept some control. Today, the one who is going to die is ignored. ” The dying notice the emptiness that is created around them when their condition worsens. They feel it and take refuge in silence. The seriously ill is alone in the world. There is a kind of incommunicability with the dying. Many dying people become aware of their condition through changes in the entourage and the nursing team. »

To this loneliness is always added the fear of a death long buried in denial, almost taboo, and which suddenly strikes by its contrast with the pleasures and comfort that are so much in modern life.