Spoilers ahead for the new Harry Potter novel?
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Really! There are SPOILERS below. Do not read if you don?t wish to be spoiled!
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Last chance to avoid spoilers!
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OK then. So apparently it didn?t take long for super obsessive compulsive fanboys to create a site called Dumbledore Is Not Dead to advance the view that, well? you can guess. The site includes tons of ridiculously detailed ?clues? that Dumbledore didn?t die at the end of Half-Blood Prince as well as lots of wacky speculation.

But one of the main reasons why people seem to think Dumbledore lives is because he appeared to plead for his life. When Snape shows up, Dumbledore gets all freaky and desperate and says ?Severus? please?? a few times. So the theory goes that either Dumbledore wanted Snape to kill him, or Dumbledore wanted Snape to help fake his death. They refuse to accept the idea that, at the moment of imminent death, Dumbledore simply freaked out and didn?t want to die.

After all, didn?t Dumbledore say in an earlier book that he saw death as the next great adventure, and didn?t fear it? Well, then, he obviously couldn?t change his mind. Or realize when it came down to it that, yeah, death actually freaked the shit out of him. Because that never happens in real life. People are always completely consistent and live up to things they said years earlier.

In fact, Dumbledore?s last night on Earth is sort of an interesting encapsulation of what it?s like to watch an aging relative or friend careen into the grave. It?s not generally crisp or glib. You have to watch all of the structures and ramparts of their personality melt a little. Even if they don?t have Alzheimer?s or dementia, just the process of a body ceasing to function by degrees is sort of infantilizing. So in the book, we have Dumbledore being force-fed the nasty potion and becoming increasingly whiny and incoherent. It?s a really disturbing scene as all of his trademark serenity vanishes. And then he stumbles into a trap, almost talks his way out of it, and winds up pleading with his murderer.

Part of what makes dying of ?old age? so demoralizing and humiliating is that you get poked and prodded a lot by medical science. Half the Medicare patients who died in Miami spent time in an ICU in their last six months of life, and nearly a third saw ten or more doctors, according to testimony at a conference on end-of-life care. And yet Medicare patients who died in other places were much less likely to see as many doctors or spend time in the ICU. And yet their ?outcomes? were much the same as the people in Miami.

Here we have to pause and ask what they mean by ?outcomes.? Well, duh. Everyone died, that?s how they got included in these statistics. But we don?t know if the people in Missoula would have lived a few more months if they?d gotten the same care as the people in Miami, or if they?d have considered those months worth having.

It?s a cliche to say that Medicare could save billions if it didn?t go overboard on ?heroic? measures for people in the last six months of life. The trouble is, you never know when someone?s in his/her last six months of life. Patients don?t wear T-shirts with their approximate date of death on them.

By law, patients can?t get hospice care under Medicare unless a doctor is willing to certify that they?re in the last six months of their lives. In some cases, a doctor will swear that a patient has less than six months to live, and then the patient will fuck everything up by living another few years. A few years ago, the federal government tried to investigate doctors for fraud if their patients lived longer than the doctors had said they would. Because the doctors had sworn the patients only had six months to live, and obviously they had lied.

I?m not sure where I?m going with this, except that the issue isn?t as simple as anyone would like it to be. We?d all like a dignified death, and less medical poking and prodding after there?s already no hope. But at the same time, sometimes the medical poking and prodding actually works, and people get a few more good years. And it?s really hard to predict which people will benefit from more care.