Dying Explained: What Happens As We Die? - Sydney Morning Herald

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We're born, we live, we die. Few things are so concrete. And yet, while we swap countless stories about the start of life, the end is a subject we're less inclined to talk about.

Conversations about death – what it is, what it looks like – are scarce until we suddenly face it head on, often for the first time with the loss of a loved one.

"We hold a lot of anxiety about what death means and I think that's just part of the human experience," says Associate Professor Mark Boughey, director of palliative medicine at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital. "Some people just really push it away and don't think about it until it's immediately in front of them."

But it doesn't need to be this way, he says.

"The more people engage and understand death and know where it's heading ... the better prepared the person is to be able to let go to the process, and the better prepared the family is to reconcile with it, for a more peaceful death."

Of course, not everyone ends up in palliative care or even in a hospital. For some people, death can be shockingly sudden, as in an accident or from a cardiac arrest or massive stroke. Death can follow a brief decline, as with some cancers; or a prolonged one, as with frailty; or it can come after a series of serious episodes, such as heart failure. And different illnesses, such as dementia and cancer, can also cause particular symptoms prior to death.

But there are key physical processes that are commonly experienced by many people as they die – whether from "old age", or indeed from cancer, or even following a major physical trauma.

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