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“The need or ability to participate in sexual activity may wane in the terminal stages of illness, but the need for touch, intimacy, and how one views oneself don’t necessarily wane in tandem. Individuals may in fact suffer from the absence of loving and intimate touch in the final months, weeks, or days of life.”

“The palliative care service posited the following hypothesis: that sexual activity neutralizes or is an antidote to death, in biological, philosophical, and psychological realms. Sex symbolically reminds us of death – and then rescues us. This paper will explore the possible connections between sex and death in the cancer and palliative care settings.”

“Few question that life's greatest drives are to reproduce and to avoid death. The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the French social theorist Michel Foucault argued that the two are fused, that the death instinct pervades sexual activity—a connection easily seen by a Frenchman whose language frames orgasms as petit mort, or ‘mini-deaths.’”

- Death Nesting, Ann-Marie Keppel

"Being a caregiver for the dying is not only a lost heart, but a lost value . The reminder of death is the strongest most important reminder of life. However, with the Slow deaths hidden from us in nursing homes or acute care and regular exposure to violent deaths and movies, video games and media showing mass shootings we are not easily able to connect with that being natural or even kind if we have never touched death gently, it’s hard to experience death comfortably as part of life."

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