Public debate on death

During the first months of Gazeta Wyborcza’s campaign “Humane Dying” we got thousands of letters and e-mails. Dedicated editors responded to almost all of them.

We could publish in the printed newspaper just a fraction. So we put many more letters online.
Here you get an excerpt of the summary written during the campaign’s first week by our deputy editor-in-chief Piotr Pacewicz:

Your letters, full of tears and sadness, will help to die in a humane way

“Did my father die in a humane way?,” a reader thinks over and over. She was with him to the end, she held his hand.

She is worried that she had not tell him about a cancer. When they approached the hospice in an ambulance, she covered the car’s windows with her back.

“My heart would break if I had told him,” she explains in a letter to Gazeta. Explains to whom? To herself? To us?

Do we must always tell the truth? We believe we should if a patient asks. What if he does not ask? What if he wants to believe that it is not the end?

Young doctor writes that he studied how to rescue the life. He was proud that he could raise everybody. But one day he started to re-animate an old man and the patient opposed: “Sir, let me die, please.” The doctor left this old man with his wife, they whispered to each other. After two hours the doctor found his patient in a ceremonial suit. Old man’s wife served him the last offices.

Somebody writes that he could not get reconciled with a relative’s death until he read our articles. Somebody else writes: “Humane Dying” is the most important mission of Gazeta after [the collapse of Communism in] 1989. A lot of people thank that we touched something painful for them, something horrifying, something they cannot talk about or even think about.

There are a lot of tears in these letters. About a father who begged for mercy and for dispatching him. About the last words that we keep in mind for years and we find new meanings of them (“See you in three days!”).

There are also tears of emotion and gratitude for doctors, hospices, hospitals. When people working there help somebody to die in a humane way, the family will be grateful forever.

However there is also a lot of letters full of anger and pain by the people whose relatives were dying alone, cheated, and humiliated. As they were dying not in a humane way. (…)

Readers are ready to help journalists in gathering data

In 2006 when we called young mothers to review maternity wards with Gazeta, we got 40,000 evaluations, most of them online.

We could then cross-check these readers’ reviews with data submitted by hospitals and facts reported by our journalists and a research company we hired.

The effect was the most comprehensive guide on 423 or 96 % of all maternity wards based in Poland.

In March 2008 we launched another campaign “Humane Dying” and we also asked our readers for help. We invited them to fill a form in print and online about how their relatives were dying in Polish hospices or hospitals.

We wanted to check if people die according to “10 rights of a dying humane being” that we had written down together with the Hospice Foundation.

Participation in a survey is anonymous. We want to send the results to hospices and hospitals as a feedback from their patients’ families. We believe it is important for doctors and nurses to know what is good and what is wrong with their services.

The survey will help us to prepare a guide on Polish hospices and hospitals planned for this autumn.

If you would like to learn more about this campaign and our plans to make a difference, read here.

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