Before Sunset : Natural light enhancing the experience of a Palliative care in Dhaka

Abstract: There is a golden hour between life and death. That hour could bring valuable realizations in a person’s life. In the last few decades, hospice and palliative care went through evolutions to make a better sense of death without treating death neglecting the human experience, which plays a major factor in overall health and well-being. A palliative approach focuses on life than focusing on death, it facilitates the optimization of life for patients livingwith terminal diseases, allowing them not to feel left behind or forgotten. As the golden hour of life arrives and seeks palliative care which is total care ensuring physiological, psychological, social, and spiritual care, we can ponder over something supporting emotions from the beginning of time. Buried deep within our collective unconscious lies ancient memories of the eternal cycle of light and dark that created our archetypical patterns of thinking and feeling. With cultural beliefs and practices affecting these emotions about the transition, there should be a pattern in which daylight evokes our feelings and thoughts. This thesis is a journey to discover the association of the daylight cycle with the activities that can evoke a sense of total care. Through the study mapping state of mind with the daylight change in 35 people in Bangladesh and preference study with 8 patients in a palliative care, the paper comes to draw attention that daylight change and views can be associated with the cycle of emotion and can give the feeling of a good life. As important as it is to glorify the experience of finding comfort, so is the art of letting go, feeling good about life, and being near a good ending. A painless ending is not only a state of body, it is also a state of mind. This thesis is an attempt to discover the first steps toward it.