Contribution short abstract:

Drawing on my research for Scripting Death: Stories of Assisted Dying in America (University of California Press, 2021), I discuss how writing about death has forced me to grapple with the ethics of representation and address questions about who has the moral authority to speak for the dead.

Contribution long abstract:

My contributions to this roundtable center on a challenge I encountered while writing my current book, Scripting Death: Stories of Assisted Dying in America (University of California Press, 2021). The book chronicles my ethnographic research documenting the experiences of patients, caregivers, health care providers, activists, and legislators with the implementation of Vermont’s 2013 medical aid-in-dying law. In the course of the research for this book, I collected hundreds of stories about deaths. Stories of death are necessarily partial, fragmented, and incomplete. Most of the stories of death in my book concern people whom I never met. Some of them had been previously described in media reports and other literary forms shared with me by my interlocutors. Writing about these deaths has forced me to grapple with the ethics of representation and address questions about who has the moral authority to speak for the dead. In my comments, I will address how a deeply felt obligation to write with compassion and care helped me to navigate the tension between exploitation and memorialization—that is, telling stories of death for professional gain, and telling stories that would not otherwise be told to change public debates.