ABSTRACT
When the British feminist journalist Jill Tweedie contracted motor neurone disease, a particularly vicious, unrelenting and incurable paralysing illness likely to kill her within the next three years, the Guardian (14 September 1993) published the news in the form of an article/interview by her friend Polly Toynbee. Tweedie was indeed, in the words of the headline, ‘raging against the dying of the light’, rejecting all the platitudes and false hopes that are sometimes offered in such situations. Four days later (18 September) a handful of letters appeared in the same paper, several of which questioned her reaction-some dearly drawing on current therapeutic ideas about death and dying. I think it is useful to ask what is going on in a world in which we can question a person’s reaction to the prospect of her or his own, imminent death.
