What Does Dying Teach Us About How to Truly Live?
A conversation with Dr. Atul Gawande
For much of my medical training, my goal as a doctor was simple: help patients live for as long as possible. But the more time I spent sitting at the bedside, the more I came to realize that more time isn’t always the same thing as more life. The people I’ve cared for haven’t just wanted to maximize their longevity; they have wanted to live in a way that truly means something to them.
That is exactly why I wanted Dr. Atul Gawande - a surgeon, public health leader, and longtime friend- to join me on Staying Human.
Atul is a practicing surgeon, a Harvard professor, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and the author of the bestselling book Being Mortal. In this episode, we step away from our clinical roles to have an honest conversation as friends about what it means to live well, what it means to die well, and how those two concepts intimately inform each other.
We talk about the deeply personal, often imperfect journeys of caring for our own family members as they neared the end of their lives. We also dive into the rapid rise of artificial intelligence in health care, evaluating both the best and worst impacts of AI and why medicine must fiercely protect the role of the clinician as a counselor, guide, and witness rather than solely a technical operator.
Staying human is a shared journey. Please send this episode on to a friend, a neighbor, or a loved one who might be looking for a bit of light and perspective on what matters most.
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This helps me see the sacred edge of medicine: not just extending time, but protecting dignity, meaning, and the personhood of the patient. Especially in an age of AI, we need clinicians not only as experts, but as counselors, guides, and witnesses. Grateful for clinicians like you both, who keep calling medicine back to what it means to stay human.
It’s about living, changing, learning, moving, helping others. My grandma of 95 used to say, “I want to live fully for as long as I can live well”. She was mentally active, physically strong and even with that, she had an unfortunate fall in a place where care was a nightmare. She died of complications from the fall.