BioMed
When people died young and at home, most families had watched someone die and knew what it looked like. Better treatments mean most of us now reach the end of life without ever having seen it. The ordinary, inherited wisdom about dying disappears along with that experience.
Dying is a bodily process that unfolds in predictable stages, much as pregnancy and birth do. Once people know those stages and the usual sights and sounds around a deathbed, what seemed alarming can be seen as normal. Bereaved people who learned this later realised that what they had witnessed was a peaceful, ordinary death.
When the only accounts of dying people hear are the hardest ones, those become what they expect. That leads to the assumption that dying is always dreadful. Public debate then treats shortening life as the only way to make it dignified, without understanding what ordinary dying actually looks like.
Fear of death has turned into fear of even mentioning dying. As a result, dying people and their families arrive at the end unprepared. Yet dying is less frightening and more peaceful the better prepared everyone is, so the silence makes it worse.
As dying moves out of everyday experience, the vocabulary for talking about it fades too. Without those words, it becomes harder for people to discuss the last part of life and say how they hope it will go. Since dying involves the whole circle of people close to someone, that loss affects them all, not just the person dying.