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Part of my job at all times is talking to the sickest patients in jail about the fact that they may be near the end of their lives. You can imagine how emotional this is.
In palliative care, we talk about helping patients define their own priorities and goals when curative therapy is no longer possible. For my patients, overwhelmingly, what they say over and over is that they want to die free.
This is what people say who will potentially be homeless when they leave jail. This is what people say when they know that they’re too sick to ever leave the hospital. It’s what people say who are estranged from family.
Dying free is about restoring dignity for someone’s final weeks, days, or hours. It’s about making sure someone’s last minutes aren’t spent with an officer sitting outside the room. It’s about minimizing the complicated grief for loved ones left behind.
Every single in custody death, those we saw coming and those we didn’t, regardless of cause, fills me with sorrow. I’m really sad this morning. I’d like to prevent as many of these as we can in the coming weeks. 
