The enigma of departure: what we can learn from dying migrants?

In an undated lecture, ‘The Problem Patient’, the doctor Cicely Saunders, presented her observations of people who had died at St Christopher’s Hospice, in South East London, between 1978-9, and whose symptoms had been difficult to manage. One of the patients was a Polish woman, “with an extermination camp background who later developed severe depression with hallucinations, helped by E.C.T.” (Electroconvulsive Therapy). Elsewhere in the boxes and files held at the Cicely Saunders Archive, at King’s College (London), were other traces of migrants. In 1976, there was Mrs. J, aged 47 “A charming West Indian: in pain, tearful and depressed. Much alone with her illness.” Saunders noted that Mrs. J was “anxious to go home to Jamaica but eventually realized she was not going to get better and was happy to stay.” The “calm and stoical” Mr. E, from Nigeria, was forty-one years old and dying from liver cancer in June 1981. Mr. E’s wife was in Nigeria and he was living alone in London; “very worried” by his illness and “says he is in God’s hands”, Saunders wrote. After the summary of a patient with an Egyptian surname, whose family was described as ‘like a kind of mafia’, are two words: ‘Another loner’.