Recently, I was admitted to hospital for emergency surgery. Everything turned out to be fine, but I had to spend more than a week in the emergency department and the ward. Due to my personal condition and the condition of others that I had observed during the boring stay in the hospital, the word that I thought of the most at that time was “death”.
In the hospitals in Macau (especially in the public one), a significant proportion of patients are elderly people. My stay in hospital allowed me to closely observe them, and the feeling I had was even more saddening.
Macau’s tradition dictates that talking about death is still a taboo. From daily conversation to debate in the local legislature, discussion on this issue is rare. The fact is, it is tough enough to live in Macau, and to die here is just as difficult.
Japan, which is also a traditional society in the East, seems to be a bit more open on this matter. The 2009 Oscar-winning Japanese film Departures brought this topic to the attention of viewers. And when I was in the hospital, I was reading a book whose title is loosely translated as Special Cleaning: a 20-year record of a man who faces Corpses written by a Japanese writer with the pen name Captain Cleaning. This so-called special cleaning is actually the handling of corpses. The author details moments from his 20-year career in this special industry and transforms it into cleaning stories about 25 rooms. Each of the stories is short but abundant in the wisdom about life and death.
There are similar works in Hong Kong and Macau, such as the book Dying in Hong Kong. The author, veteran journalist Leila Chan, interviewed families of the diseased and conducted research into local funeral services. Through digging into the issue, the 200 thousand-word long publication, which is divided into two issues, delved into the mindset of the population, medical resources and public policies.
The other book that I am anticipating and really curious about is The Last Room, the latest work by Dr Chan Ka Fan (his pen name) who is in charge of the Department of Pathology at the Queen Mary Hospital’s morgue. This book takes readers into the morgue, the last room a person will visit, through the story of a cancer patient, and allows the readers to learn how to handle and accept death by providing them with the chance to observe it close up through the lens of an insider.
Compared to what is happening in our neighbouring city, there is not much positive to talk about in Macau. We avoid the discussion of death and its related issues, but the problems will not go away just because we avoid them. Recently some issues were exposed concerning the funeral industry in Macau that sparked some debate in the community, but eventually led nowhere. As for hospice care in Macau, we still lack the channels to better understand it. There is still a vacuum in Macau regarding assisting other (be it the patient or families) in dealing with death.
People die. No matter how young or old, healthy or sick you are, death is the last and only option. In fact, death is like a mirror that helps us to learn the dignity and value of life, as well as to reflect on our own life.