Living with the dying

The Sickness

Miranda’s passion is trying to understand the workings and limitation of the human body, but patients are a somewhat tiresome element of that. “Doing something to a living body,” we are told, “interfering with another’s breathing, intervening in another’s blood, invading another’s flesh was not an important part of his vocation”.

It is no surprise so that he views sickness in similar terms. It is “a mistake, a bureaucratic blunder on nature’s part, an absolute lack of efficiency,” and it is only when his own father is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer that he comes to understand illness on a more intimate level. Miranda, who has delivered such dreadful news many times, now finds himself incapable of telling someone so close to him that he are going to die.