1 Aug, 2013
Long-living Japanese society needs better ‘quality of death’ | The Japan Times
A quarter of a million bedbound elderly people are kept alive in Japan, often for years, by a feeding tube surgically inserted into their stomach. A few months ago, my 96-year-old grandmother became one of them.
Feeding tubes are so common in Japan that my family wasn’t initially consulted about the procedure, which is effectively irreversible. When my mother walked into Grandma’s room the next morning and saw a tube, she dropped to her knees by the bedside and stayed there for hours, crying.
“I am sorry. I didn’t mean to do this to you,” my mom repeated over and over.
As medical science becomes more sophisticated, we’re finding new ways to prolong life. When my grandma, Hisako Miyake, was born in 1916, life expectancy in Japan was around 43 years; now it is 83, the longest in the world.
When it comes to death, Japan doesn’t score so well.
Read the rest: Long-living Japanese society needs better ‘quality of death’ | The Japan Times.
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