Dancing with Master D: Notes on Life and Death

by Bert Keizer

One of the great pleasures of book sales is the fact that everything's cheap, which for some reason always seems more interesting then when everything's free. I'm never half as excited at the library as I am at a book sale, probably because the library expects their books back. But at the book sale, I can own something for life - and all for only a dollar. The cheap price often means I'm more willing to take a chance on something strange or unusual and is almost always how I've discovered some hidden gem, some author I might otherwise never have read. It's how I came to meet Graham Greene; and now it's how I had the supreme pleasure of reading Dancing with Mister D which, aside from it's terrible title, is a moving, funny and thought-provoking mediation on mortality, aging, medicine, assisted suicide and, most of all, the fact that doctors are just as uncomfortable with death as everyone else.


A physician in a Dutch nursing home, Bert Keizer has spent his life with terminally ill seniors, many of whom are suffering form a laundry list of unfortunate ailments: cancer, AIDS, strokes and, more often then not, being forgotten by their families. Through the book, Dr. Keizer takes us from patient to patient - and from doctor to doctor - and reveals how individual our notions of death and dying truly are. Equally fascinating is that Dr. Keizer works in Holland, where euthanasia is permitted. This puts him and his colleagues in the unusual position of doling out death as often as they try to save people from it. Although "save" is not really the right word - as Dr. Keizer discusses throughout the book, nobody can really be saved from death. It is a fate which merely gets delayed.

Although the book that should be required reading for health care professionals, Dancing with Mister D succeeds on numerous levels - it is a memoir, a book of philosophy, a gripping narrative that is equally wry and moving. It's both fiction and non-fiction, if such a thing can be said (a person might use the term creative non-fiction, but that person wouldn't be me, given that I'm morally opposed to using it to describe anything.) Although based on his letters and persona journals, Dr. Keizer has altered names and circumstances to protect patient confidentiality and even his own name is different; he is referred to throughout the book as Anton, which I'm assuming is a reference to Chekhov. The book is nothing but a series of short personal essays but gathered together they succeed in creating an entire world populated by withered flower children, WWII survivors, cynical doctors, blundering neurosurgeons and a neurotic central character whose proximity to death has left him analytical of everything he encounters.

The book is also a lucid examination of euthanasia and would probably convince many that assisted suicide is something that needs to be re-examined by all societies who have outlawed it. This is an unintentional side effect - the book certainly isn't a diatribe and Dr. Keizer never actually addresses the issue head-on; but his descriptions of suffering patients, abandoned seniors and crippled centurians cannot help but make one feel ashamed of anyone who works so hard to prolong a despair that is both physical and emotional.

As Dr. Keizer points out time and again, we all look upon the frail and the dying and think "that will never be me." Then, before we know it, we're on the other side of the fence. Even if we avoid diseases, heart attacks or strokes, there is still old age itself. It is easy to cling to religious beliefs and moral queasiness when we are still in the midst of our lives; but Dr. Keizer takes us through the looking glass and in doing so gives us all a glimpse of where many of us are headed. Yes, medical advances means our lives are always being prolonged. But changing the road hardly changes the destination.

For all this, Dancing with Mister D is never morbid or depressing; it is a profound and deeply entertaining trip that proves, as the show Six Feet Under taught us years ago, that there as many stories about death as there are about life.