ABSTRACT
“Living is dying.” “To be born is to begin to die.” “Each time I breathe, I die a little.” These statements, in spite of undeniable philosophic implications, are too often used as equivocations when we try to learn more about the actual process of dying. Yet they point up the difficulty in defining the onset of dying. Dwight Eisenhower died after a series of heart attacks dating back to his first term as president; Adlai Stevenson dropped on the street and died soon after; Robert Kennedy was shot and died in a matter of hours. We could, assuming sufficient medical information, plot what Glaser and Strauss (1968) have termed the dying trajectory for each of these men. But we must learn more than the objectively charted trajectory of dying. We must also consider the trajectory as seen by the person himself and by each important person in his environment.
