“You Are Going to Die”: Risky Truth-telling in the Contemporary American Hospital

Modern medicine often obscures death, sustaining life at all costs and rendering mortality a choice. This paper examines two challenges Christian nurses face in caring for the dying: medicine’s obfuscation of death (Kaufman, Weber) and the hierarchy that disqualifies nursing knowledge (Foucault). Nursing traditional response in patient advocacy assumes patients can self-determine their best interests, yet institutional truths shape what patients can recognize as their own. Instead, this paper proposes parrhesia—courageous truth-telling—as a faithful nursing response. Drawing from Foucault’s late work on parrhesia and Christian asceticism, the nurse parrhesiast humbly critiques medicine’s denial of death, bearing witness to life’s finitude. By speaking truthfully despite personal risk, the nurse parrhesiast disrupts institutional silence around mortality, restoring honesty and compassion to end-of-life care.