Cardiologist and public health doctor, Véronique Fournier founded the AP-HP Clinical Ethics Center in 2002, which she directed for twenty years. From 2016 to 2020, she also chaired the National Center for Palliative and End-of-Life Care, established by the Claeys-Leonetti law. Today, she devotes herself to running the La Vie Vieille association, which she created. Véronique Fournier is also one of the co-founders of the self-proclaimed National Council for Old Age, created in 2021. She is the author of Since you have to die (The Discovery, 2015), Is death a right? (La Documentation française, 2016), Who is old here? (Rue de Seine Editions, 2022).
What does it mean to “succeed in death”?
Probably the answer to this question depends on the era. For me, succeeding in one’s death today means succeeding in obtaining a death that resembles us, that is to say, one that resembles who we were, the way we constructed ourselves, the idea that we make of our life and our death, of our convictions. Successfully dying can therefore be very different from one person to another, because life paths are increasingly individualized. We have learned to free ourselves from the rule and to each follow our own unique path.
This article is taken from “Special Issue Le Monde – Death in the Face, 2023”. This special issue is on sale at newsstands or online by going to on our store website.
So, yes, everyone will imagine the end of the journey in their own way. Some will want to look death in the face and experience their agony in full awareness. Others will strive to respect the precepts of their religion to the letter. Still others will want to choose the time, date and manner of getting to die. In this context, the role of society should, in my opinion, be the same for everyone: not to pass judgment and to help everyone get as close as possible to the death that would be a successful death for them.
Why associate a performance term (succeed) with the end (death)?
I don’t know if succeeding is a performance term. I don’t understand it that way, I think that death is an essential moment in life and that a successful death is something that we think about first in terms of ourselves, and not in terms of performance.
How can the expression “gentle death”, containing a psychological component about a dying person, replace agony? Isn’t pain insensitive to the sweetness of words?
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