Glimpsing Death Through Zoom

Abstract

This personal essay brings readers into what it is like to experience a patient's death for the first time as a medical student, but with a topical twist: this experience happens over Zoom. The author is part of the 2023 cohort of medical school graduates who will have spent at least half of medical school online. Most people think of virtual medical education as a loss, but this essay is about how “Zoom medical school” actually allowed one student to experience a “good death” very unlike the deaths typically witnessed in hospitals. The essay details and reflects upon the experience of shadowing a palliative care physician’s Zoom appointments with a patient, Mrs. K, over the weeks leading up to her death from cancer, surrounded by children and grandchildren at home. In contrast, the author weaves in the story of her own grandfather who died last year from COVID-19, intubated alone in an ICU all the way in Tehran, Iran. The essay concludes that medicine is not just about preventing death, but about making a good death possible—and that a good death is embedded in the communities that brought meaning to one’s life in the first place.