Mark Taubert is a doctor in palliative medicine and senior lecturer in the Cardiff University School of Medicine.
“She liked this,” says the woman’s daughter, smiling and rolling her eyes, as though to say “Elton John, really?” The dying woman’s husband glances at his daughter, then at me, and says, “We followed the advice from one of the nurses to play some music in her last few hours and days.” He smiles slightly, as if in apology for the jaunty tune ( I never knew me a better time and I guess I never will ) in this solemn setting.
His wife’s eyes are closed. Her breathing is steady. Her pulse is fine, about 90 beats per minute. She is much calmer than yesterday, when she was flushed, frowning and seemed in considerable pain. But she is dying. We are giving her as much support as we can to help her be free of distress or discomfort.
I’m a palliative care doctor. I work in Britain in a general hospital, a cancer hospital and a hospice. Sitting with someone you know and love who is dying can stir a craving for a bit of normality in what otherwise might seem a surreal setting. Not that dying isn’t “normal,” but nowadays death and dying are often hidden away in hospital wards or nursing homes, and many people don’t know what to do, or what not to do.
I often tell the family and friends of a dying person that they needn’t speak in hushed tones, that they are welcome to chat or share a joke or call out crossword clues. Or play some tunes. Putting on a favorite song can become a ritual celebration as you enjoy a moment you shared many times before.
Some people don’t need any encouragement — I have seen plenty of terminally ill patients die with music playing in the background. But in the past few years, as the benefits of music in these settings have become more apparent to me, I have paid more attention to what is on.
Music can even help with those who are severely ill but recovering. The father of one of my younger patients put his playlist on while his daughter was in critical condition. Through her delirium, she complained when a well-known rap song from the ’90s came on. Later, after she awoke and was more responsive, her father defended his back catalogue of music, and a debate about good taste ensued — their conversation accompanied by the usual hospital soundtrack of beeps and infusion drip alarms and squeaking cart wheels.
Listening to familiar musical passages can prompt significant emotional responses, causing the release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine. In particular, they are released in an ancient segment of our brains, known as the striatum, which is associated with emotional responses to rewarding inputs such as food, sex, drugs and . . . rock-and-roll.
What happens to the brain in our dying moments? The shutting-down process is not as straightforward as you might imagine. Most of the research on the topic has been done with rodents, so we may not be able to extrapolate too much. But dying rats experience heightened activity in their frontal cortical areas, when the oxygen and glucose have been taken away and there is a huge influx of calcium into their brain cells. Our ability to have conscious thought and experience depends on the strength of the connections between the frontal areas of the brain, associated with mental abilities, and those nearer the back of the brain that process sensory information. These connections, in dying rats, actually strengthened by five to eight times after cardiac arrest, compared with waking moments.
Such a surge in the human brain may explain why some people who have near-death experiences report heightened sensory information. Those who are dying may also be able to process auditory information better than is generally assumed. It is entirely feasible that, in our dying moments, we are more aware of what is happening around us than previously believed.
Over the past few years, my co-workers and I have compiled what amounts to a deathbed playlist of songs we’ve heard in rooms where people are dying. The entries range from Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything” and Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’ ” to Mahler symphonies and Oasis’s “Wonderwall.” What will be on yours?
What’s the last song you would want to hear? Tell us in the comments, and we may add your song to our playlist.
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