Book. Everything evolves. Even the representation of this fatality which weighs on all that lives: death. People no longer die as they used to, surrounded by their loved ones, but in the hospital. The relationship to death and support for the dying are changing under the effect of demographic aging.
Japan, the country with the longest life expectancy on the planet and where, as a result, the journey towards the end of people weakened by age is getting longer, is like a laboratory for the problems facing developed nations. In the Archipelago, 30% of the population is over 65 (in France, 18%) and, in ten years, those over 75 will represent a quarter of the population.
Also, Live your death at home in Japanby Dr. Ochiro Kobori, “can it contribute to advancing reflection on a problem that challenges our thinking about medical and social practice”, writes Xavier Emmanuelli in the preface to the French translation which has the merit of fluidity. It strives to establish correspondences between the French and Japanese medical systems, which facilitates reading.
The prolongation of life weighs on national budgets, and especially perhaps on the moral duty of any society to ensure a decent death for its citizens. The treatment of elderly patients, dying in the making, is a problem that torments leaders and the medical profession but also Japanese opinion, as evidenced by the film by filmmaker Chie Hayakawa, Plan 75presented in mid-May at Cannes, where she imagines that one day the elderly could be offered euthanasia, the term of which they would set, in order to alleviate the ” burden “ what does keeping these people alive represent for the State? “unproductive” whose presence ” disabled “ the economy.
Gentler slopes to the abyss
Far from this chilling modernist version of the film The Ballad of Narayama (1983), by Shohei Imamura, adapted from the short story by Shichiro Fukazawa, which describes the abandonment of an old mother by her son on the top of a mountain, doctor Kobori believes that it has become imperative to rethink the representation of death, and to reserve for the elderly gentler slopes towards the abyss.
A brilliant surgeon, he became a “neighborhood doctor” after his retirement, visiting the elderly patients who are sometimes terminally ill at home. He treats them, relieves them and above all perhaps listens to them, seeking to interpret their ultimate desires as well as those of their family in disarray.
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