Maggie's Farm

Why people want to die in hospitals?

Because they are sick of their "loving" relatives.

Because they love their relatives and know that it is too painful for those relatives to both lose them by degrees and be unable to escape that inch by inch loss. When your loved one is dying in hospital, you go home periodically to change clothes, stare into the empty house and prepare for the inevitable. Then you go back to the bedside. Hospitals, at least the NHS ones I have spent time in recently at dying relatives' bedside, can be compassionate islands of life at the edge of death. The nurse's aide cracking a bad joke and cheering up both dying patient and stressed out relative beside her. The other patients in the room clumsily comforting and sticking their noses in the family's busines :'Ere, she'll be gone soon--no sense in fighting now!" like a Greek chorus.
At times, a dysfunctional family can be calmed and brought to hours of real companionship and mutual love in the neutral space of the hospital. Routine chaplain visits may bring back a wayward visitor, as well as the patient, to God. People are off balance, and sometimes as a result open to the light and comfort of their God when at home they would have drowned their sorrows with several scotches and the test match.
Obnoxious family members are ordered to behave by intimidating Staff Sisters (Britspeak for bossy and highly competent nurses who know the patients, their meds and prognoses far better than the occasionally visiting gods---er---doctors and train of student MDs. )
Drunken family members are kept away from the patient.
At home, there is nobody to protect the patient from families that are not Norman Rockwell perfect or that will simply not let the patient alone.

While a hospital is noisy, distracting, apparently impersonal, and certainly full of germs that will hasten anyone's departure from this earthly coil, it is the only place that many patients have ever in their lives been free to rest, actually be sick instead of having to soldier on. Especially so for women or for men who have spent years caregiving for an ill spouse before they themselves became fatally ill. When you are sick at home, if you have been the homemaker, you can rarely relax or let yourself be taken care of.

There are also the surprising cases where a supposedly dying patient lingers for weeks in a hospital when they were at death's door at home. It often emerges that the histrionically caring relative was actually starving and torturing the patient, or just leaving them alone all day helpless in their room. Some people revive amazingly with the kind bustling company of pretty nurses or even just a nurse they can still find the energy to insult (my mother once hissed "get that pansy out of here!" about a too pretty male nurse and I knew there was life in the old bird yet. )

What I am getting at (and ,sorry, emotion makes me longwinded) is that a hospital with kind staff may be dirty, crowded, noisy and apparently distracting. But in fact they may be better places to die than in some homes. Many of the same people who tout the virtues of people dying at home because of the traditional values better honored, are really just after the cost-savings.

Most dying people ,like most animals,withdraw from their pack as they prepare either to meet their maker or curse God and die alone. This can be very hurtful to the relatives who truly care, even if they understand it intellectually. But if it happens in a neutral setting (ie: a hospital) it seems less like a personal rejection, and more like a stage in a painful, but inevitable process.

The support offered grieving relatives beside dying patients is the other main advantage of a hospital death. The families have needs too. Finally, I have a loving and unstable relative who is reduced to near hysteria every time she walks by the room where her father died at home. Rooms take on the emotional freight of the events that take place in them. If your relatives are matter of fact and can munch their sausages happily over the same table Gramps collapsed on during his final heart attack, this is not a problem.

Home is overrated.