The need to better understand the experience of patients confronted with impending death was examined by Copp (1997). She sought to explore this experience particularly from the nursing perspective and exploring the nurse-patient relationship within the context of patients living with impending death. Copp found that patients who knew they were going to die at an uncertain time made many references to a separation between theirbody and theirself,as though they were separate entities. This split in between oneself and one’s body was examined closely to better understand the individuals’ readiness to die. The readiness to die theory was based on four patterns or modes that individuals could be going through at any given time that relate to the degree of readiness of their body and their self to death. Dying persons could only be in one mode at a time but could change between modes as
their illness progressed and as they came to terms with their mortality. These four modes are organized by:
• Person ready, body not ready • Person ready, body ready • Person not ready, body ready • Person not ready, body not ready
It is quite possible that death could occur within each of the four defined modes; however, as clinicians we could only hope that the majority of our patients would be within the “per- son ready, body ready” mode. In this mode, both the patient’s body and the patient’s inter- nal self are aligned as being ready. Copp’s theory provides a different way to think about how patients who know they are going to die might be processing that information.
What You Should Know
• Theories, such as the Quality of Life Model and Uncertainty in Illness theory can help nurses understand commonalities in the illness experience of their patients.
• Patients can go through 5 stages of dying including: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
• An open awareness of dying often has the best outcomes for both the patient and clinician.
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