My step-dad will be dead soon, and it is weird.

He’s been dying for months now, and of course they don’t know when he’ll actually die so nobody knows what to do. It seems to me like after millions of years of dying we’d be better at it by now.

But on the contrary, we’re only just beginning to learn. All that practice was for naught because of our fancy medical advancements, improved diets and therefore prolonged life expectancies, coupled with the rising trend of lifestyles that lend themselves towards slowly debilitating diseases, we have extended how long dying takes and also made these long “dyings” downright commonplace. We’re obsessed with living but not quality, so we gulp down our poisons and are generally careless with our bodies, and then act surprised and cling desperately to every last machine- and/or drug-assisted breath.

It hasn’t been an overnight change, but it has been pretty quick (last 200 years or so), and good ol’ Culture hasn’t had time to catch up. Culture, whichever one you happen to belong to, lets you know what standard gestures and occasions to make and have, which cliché phrases of praise, encouragement or sympathy to give, which flowers and supplies make appropriate gifts, and even what kinds of stationary or cards to choose and how long a period is acceptable and/or necessary for rejoicing or grieving, whenever a person is born, ill, newly graduated or dead. I think these stages in life have received considerable cultural coverage because they’re all instances of speed bumps and moving on, which can be simultaneously wonderful and terrifying. Weddings also fall into this category of Major Life Events that scare and thrill us.

Tradition and etiquette help make them a tad less terrifying and a little more predictable and familiar, and so I find the absence of information about how to deal with the process of dying painfully conspicuous. What can you do when there is no hope of getting better and little idea of when death will come? There is nothing to congratulate, to encourage, or indeed heal at all. Dying is an always-open wound immune to all life’s sunshine, for it is not living, but not quite dead, either. I just wish we’d had enough time to come up with some answers because, as it stands, there aren’t any useful ones.