The Final Adventure & dying Well

In Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie writes, “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” The line lingers, half whimsical and half haunting, a child’s voice echoing through one of the oldest fears known to humanity. When Peter says it, he isn’t being reckless; he’s being curious. He hasn’t yet learned the rules we live by, the ones that tell us death is a mistake, something to outsmart or delay indefinitely. His wonder is untrained. And perhaps that’s why it startles us.

We live in a culture that promises endless control: better medicine, longer life, tighter monitoring, more metrics. But for all our progress, death still comes. It is the one certainty that binds us, leveling every difference of title, wealth, or power. We will all, one day, make that crossing. And if that is true, then the question is not how to avoid it, but how to do it well.

A void

For much of medicine’s modern history, that question has been quietly avoided. Death is treated as a failure of intervention, not a feature of being human. We wage war on it in sterile rooms with fluorescent lights, our language full of battle metaphors: “fighting,” “winning,” “losing.” Yet there is another way of seeing, the way that faith, story, and centuries of human wisdom have always whispered. Death is not the opposite of life. It is the bookend that gives life its shape. It is the final threshold through which love must pass.

The Christian tradition has long framed this reality not as despair, but as invitation. The Apostle Paul called death “gain,” not because it is painless, but because it draws the finite into the infinite (Philippians 1:21). The Psalms teach us to “number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). These are not morbid preoccupations; they are acts of attention. To remember our mortality is not to fixate on the end, but to live more fully in the meantime. It is, paradoxically, to become more alive.

Medicine, in its own way, has been chasing that same goal: to preserve life, to stretch the arc a little farther. And we are learning extraordinary things about longevity. People are living longer, surviving diagnoses that once seemed impossible. Yet at the same time, we are confronted with a paradox that is hard to ignore. Chronic illness is rising, mental health is fraying, and cancer, once thought of as a disease of age, is showing up more and more in the young.

Paradox? You bet.

We are prolonging years, yet not always preserving wholeness. We have built an age of preservation without always asking what, exactly, we are preserving. Bodies that breathe longer, perhaps, but not always souls that rest easier. In our fear of dying, we risk forgetting how to live. And in our fixation on longevity, we risk confusing quantity of life with quality of being alive.

That tension lives at the heart of modern medicine. It is not that preservation is wrong; it is that preservation alone is too small a goal. Healing, in the fullest sense, must include peace. And peace rarely comes from more interventions. It comes from honesty, curiosity, and presence.

A 2020 study in JAMA Network Open found that patients who received early palliative care, care that acknowledged mortality without surrendering to it, not only lived with greater peace, but often lived longer (Ferrell et al., 2020). Naming the truth did not shorten life; it deepened it. It allowed for conversation, for clarity, for meaning. It shifted the focus from “How long?” to “How well?”

I once heard a hospice nurse describe her patients as “the bravest explorers I know.” They were not fearless, but (for no other choice) journeyed on. And, for those of us who walk beside them, providers, caregivers, families, that wonder can reshape how we practice presence. The work of accompaniment is not about curing; it is about witnessing. It is standing in the quiet tension between life preserved and life completed and saying, “I’ll walk with you as far as I can.” That is not resignation. That is faithfulness.

When Barrie wrote Peter Pan, he imagined a world where children never grew up, where adventure never ended. But even in Neverland, the day grows dim. “To die will be an awfully big adventure,” Peter says, and the next line, often forgotten, adds, “But it was to live that had been the best of all.” That is the wisdom medicine and faith share when they are in right relationship: to live well, to die well, and to love well in between. To see mortality not as an interruption, but as a mirror that clarifies what matters.

Our task, whether as clinicians, caregivers, or simply as fellow travelers, is not to escape death. It is to learn how to meet it rightly. To prepare, to forgive, to reconcile, to notice. To hold another’s story and bear witness to the mystery we all will meet.

For those of us who believe in resurrection, death is not the end of the adventure. But even for those who do not, it remains the common journey, the one human passage that refuses to divide us. And if that is true, then dying well is not a medical outcome. It is a moral one. It is a way of loving the world enough to let it go when the time comes.

And so perhaps Peter Pan was wiser than we give him credit for. Death will be an awfully big adventure. But life, the choosing, the noticing, the telling of the story... that will always be the best of all.

References

Ferrell, B. R., Temel, J. S., Temin, S., et al. (2020). Integration of palliative care into standard oncology care: ASCO guideline update. JAMA Network Open, 3(7), e2018243.

National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. (2023). Advance care planning: Trends and data. NHPCO Research Report. Pew Research Center. (2021). Views on end-of-life medical treatments and death talk among U.S. adults. Pew Research Center.