Deathbed Scene

Deathbed scenes are representations of the end of some person's life. The person may be real or fictional, and the presence of an actual bed is symbolic rather than necessary. What it reinforces when present is the comparatively extended nature of the death process. In this respect, deathbed scenes contrast with scenes of sudden death. In clear cases of sudden death, the dying person has no protracted opportunity to reflect upon his or her life. Deathbed scenes depict a more reflective process. The dying person must be awake and sufficiently in possession of their faculties to reason instructively about their predicament.

The most famous deathbed scene is set out in Plato's dialogue, the Phaedo. Faced with the prospect of his own demise, Plato depicts Socrates shunning any temptation to despair and maintaining a cheerful equanimity. His sends away his weeping wife and engages in an ultimately inconclusive but engaging dialogue concerning death and the likelihood of an afterlife. There is no fetishization of dying well as something apart from ordinary conduct. In the absence of any guarantees about the future, Socrates ends his life in a way that affirms its worth.

Socrates' deathbed scene has parallels in biblical and rabbinical literature, where a dying sage or patriarch gives a final parting lesson to his disciples. Occasionally there is an element of conflict and role reversal, with the dying man being instructed and set on the right path through dialogue with someone present at his death. This recurring theme of dying well and its association with the deathbed is present in a more structured and regulated way in late medieval and early modern Christian texts. As well as placing more formal requirements on the dying person (the moriens), there is a greater emphasis on the theme of conflict and being torn. The deathbed scene represents a time of crisis and struggle, as devils and angels vie for possession of the soul. The death of each person is to be, on a small scale, an imitatio Christi as the worldly and the spiritual are torn apart.

The earliest dedicated text in this Christian tradition was the Ars Moriendi (The Art of Dying), written by an unknown cleric and published around 1450 and frequently republished for 2 centuries thereafter. The text gives guidance on how to die well in the presumed absence of a guiding and counseling priest. The woodcuts accompanying the text depict contrasting temptations and inspirations that surround the moriens. The temptations are disbelief, despair, impatience with suffering, pride, and avarice. For every deathbed temptation, there is assistance available. The reader is offered hope rather than terrifying, macabre depictions of damnation.

What seems to be a departure from earlier, preChristian and pagan traditions is that suicide (which plays a part in both the death of Socrates and later in accounts of the death of the Roman philosopher Seneca) now seem to be ruled out, not so much as a rejection of despair, but as a rejection of impatience with suffering. Death is to be waited for with patience.

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