En personlig död (A Personal Death) – a chance to win Björn Fagerberg’s new book

NEW BOOK. During his career as a physician specializing in internal medicine, Björn Fagerberg has been involved in many end-of-life situations, which he was used to handle professionally. Late in life, after a few deaths of close family members, he discovered that this approach was insufficient. In the face of death there is so much more, and now he has authored the book that he himself was looking for.

He describes his first encounters with death, describing them as contradictory experiences. The first dead person he encountered was as a medical student. The corpse on the autopsy table was absolutely perfect, but something was missing besides the fact that none of the body’s cells were functioning anymore. “The soul had fled,” appeared as spontaneous thought. Later, he spent a summer substituting as a medical examiner and experienced how the tissues of the human body are like those of other mammals.

“The spontaneous idea of a soul met the experience of the animality of the human body. These were my starting points for learning how to deal with death in everyday clinical practice,” says Björn Fagerberg.

Encounters with death

Even as a young doctor, Björn experienced how different death can be. He remembers a visit with the coast guards to a remote island in the archipelago. There an old woman had died the way she wanted to; in the place she had always lived. During the return journey, dawn arrived over a calm sea. It was beautiful with a sense of peace. In stark contrast was an emergency visit to a solitary farm, where the man had committed a brutal suicide. The immense shock of the relatives made Bjorn face his own minuteness when faced with the finality of death.

“Much later, my father passed away and my daughter died of cancer shortly after giving birth to her second child.” At that time, his professional way of dealing with death was insufficient. Instead, he felt a need for knowledge that connects death with life, culture, and people in a community,” says Björn.

Working on the book took many years, as he also needed to read up on humanities and social sciences. He thought his science education would be a hindrance to his work, but it turned out to be a win-win situation that made it possible to write the book.

Controversial experiences

Björn Fagerberg’s book, “En personlig död” (A Personal Death) has several themes. First, it is about the individual: how is the fear of deah and dying managed and what do we know about approaching death and be dying?

“At this borderline between life and death, resources are available to help individuals cope with the end-of-life, sometimes even with an enhanced sense of life. Near-death experiences, visions on the deathbed and related phenomena also occur in the vicinity of death and often remove the fear of dying,” says Björn Fagerberg, who in his book provides a literature review that confirms the existence of these well-known, but so far controversial experiences.

The healthcare service took over from the church

The next theme is based on the community and how death has been handled, from the hunter-gatherer period to the present day. In agricultural communities, the birth and death of people was part of the circle of life in that culture. Death was a family matter, which also included both village traditions and religion.

Modern death meant that healthcare took over from the church. Death was removed from the family and village to hospitals and nursing homes. Another theme is how long we now live in Sweden: More than half of all women and men reach the age of 87 and 84 respectively before they die, and almost 90% reach retirement age before the end of their lives. The issue of euthanasia is described from different perspectives including societal development, culture, ethics, the individual and the doctor.

Towards a personal death

The final chapter of the book is a provocative idea of personal death.

“At the end of the day we are all dying, most people are getting very old, loneliness is widespread, and traditions have been removed. Instead, death is medicated and discussed in terms of palliative care and euthanasia,” says Björn Fagerberg.

With the book, he wants to awaken an interest in individuals and community to consider the last part of life, when the fear of death is still waning, as a time for existential exchanges about life and death with one’s own life taking center stage:

“Personal death can be given a content and a community. For farmers a “good death” was of essence, medication led to a “hidden death”, and now a “personal death” is in sight.

Active at the Wallenberg Laboratory

Björn studied medicine in Gothenburg and received his PhD from the University of Gothenburg in 1984 with a thesis on the blood pressure-lowering effect of dieting and reduced salt intake in high blood pressure.  He continued research on atherosclerotic diseases at the Wallenberg Laboratory and worked for a long time an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Medicine.

He also initiated the large national population study, SCAPIS (Swedish Cardiopulmonary Bioimage Study), which now includes 30,000 individuals and six universities:

“I got the idea in 2007 during a long run when I suddenly realized that here in Sweden, we could perform the large studies that were at the forefront of cardiovascular research infinitely better than in the US – if we cooperate!

All respondents liked the idea and with the help of the Heart Lung Foundation and other investors, the study is already in a re-examination phase.

“The project is a shining example of the importance of collaboration as well as the efforts of enthusiasts like Göran Bergström at the Wallenberg Laboratory,” says Björn Fagerberg.

Björn is still conducting research as Professor emeritus in collaboration with Lars Barregård at Occupational and Environmental Medicine on environmental toxins such as cadmium, lead, and atherosclerotic diseases.

BY: ELIN LINDSTRÖM