Poetics of Dying is an educational toolkit created by Amanda Astorga-Pinto, Naoki Hashimoto, and Jenny Liu in collaboration with New York Presbyterian Hospital and Parsons School of Design. The kit is designed to teach medical practitioners how to have honest and open conversations about the end of life.

We live in an age in which medical advances are allowing people to live longer and attitudes are shifting on survival and longevity. Still, issues surrounding dying and end of life care have remained largely unaddressed by non–palliative care doctors. Poetics of Dying addresses the lack of attention and communication around the meaning of “a good end of life” because of an overemphasis on acute interventions and rescue.

Our research tools evolved into an educational concept tool that we continue to prototype with medical practitioners in training. We discovered that to change their approach to dying and care, physicians in training must seek insight from a realization of their own biases in language and communication.

The tool does not explicitly lay out these key concerns but creates conditions that allow physicians in training to arrive at these realizations themselves. Understanding that honest doctor–patient conversations are an overlooked area of medical care that is closely related to emotional and financial burdens, we began our process by examining how physician attitudes around the end of life are formed, starting with the early stages of their medical training.

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