Living fully while dying: why terminal illness does not end a life early, and how to protect agency, pleasure, and identity in the time that remains.
A terminal diagnosis often turns a person into a patient in everyone's eyes, including their own. Conversations narrow to treatment, prognosis, and logistics, and the living part gets set aside long before the dying starts.
This piece pushes back on that. It looks at how to protect agency and ordinary pleasure, how to keep being consulted about your own life, and how families and clinicians can hold both truths at once - that someone is dying, and that they are still entirely alive until they are not.