Living alone may be difficult, but what about dying alone? Physicians and nurses are the new priests accompanying people as they face death. But the experience of nursing homes, assisted living, and palliative wards are often some of the loneliest spaces in human culture. “He said, ‘Someone finally saw me. I’ve been in this hospital for 20 years and I didn’t think anyone ever saw me.’” This episode is part 5 of a series, SOLO, which explores the theological, moral, and psychological dimensions of loneliness, solitude, and being alone. In this episode, Columbia physician and medical ethicist Lydia Dugdale joins Macie Bridge to reflect on loneliness, solitude, and what it means to die—and live—well. Drawing from her clinical work in New York City and the years of research and experience that went into her book The Lost Art of Dying, Dugdale exposes a crisis of unrepresented patients dying alone, the loss of communal care, and medicine’s discomfort with mortality. She recalls the ...