Roger Nairn's father chose the date he would die. Medical Assistance in Dying, March 30, 2021. Planned, witnessed, peaceful. By every clinical measure, that qualifies as a good death.
The grief showed up anyway.
That detail sits at the center of a question most men never think to ask until they're standing in a hospital parking lot, trying to remember where they parked: is there actually such a thing as a good death? And if there is — does it matter?
The short answer is yes, and yes. But neither answer works the way you think it will.
What "Good Death" Actually Means (And Why You've Never Heard of It)
Palliative care researchers and hospice workers have spent decades trying to define this. The consensus, roughly: a good death is one where pain is managed, the dying person's wishes are honored, there has been some relational closure, and the practical affairs are in reasonable order. It's not a philosophical concept. It's a clinical framework, documented across decades of end-of-life research, and it has a real effect on how survivors process what comes after.
Most men don't encounter this idea until they have to. It doesn't come up at the hardware store. Nobody mentions it at the barbershop. And the healthcare system rarely introduces it early enough for families to do anything useful with it. So you find out about the concept of a good death roughly around the same time you're learning that your dad had a bank account nobody knew about and a storage unit full of things that turn out to be meaningful to everyone and useful to no one.
It's also worth naming something up front: this conversation looks completely different depending on the kind of death you got. A sudden loss — a heart attack on a Tuesday afternoon, an accident with no warning — forecloses almost everything discussed under "good death." There was no planned goodbye, no final conversation, no tying up of loose ends. That's its own specific wound. An anticipated death, where illness gives some runway, allows for different possibilities but carries its own kind of exhaustion. And then there's chosen death — MAiD, where someone exercises legal control over when and how they leave — which is perhaps the most extreme version of "planned" we have access to. All three types still end in grief. What differs is the shape of what you carry afterward.
When Someone Gets to Choose: MAiD and What It Still Couldn't Fix
Roger wrote about his dad's death in a post called "Balance, you must find." There's a line in there that clarifies something important. The date his father chose — March 30th — was also his sister's birthday. She now carries that collision every year. An anniversary that belongs to her, permanently shared with something she didn't choose.
That detail matters because it illustrates something that no amount of planning can prevent. When someone exercises maximum control over how they die, the downstream effects on the people who love them can still be entirely outside anyone's control. A chosen death date doesn't come with a map for the people who remain.
MAiD, as a process, is perhaps the clearest possible case for what a good death looks like on paper. The person dying has time to prepare. The family knows it's coming. There can be real conversations, real goodbyes, real presence in the final moments. A piece published at Rocking Over 40 describes a similar experience — a father's death that was peaceful, witnessed, surrounded by love, and still utterly devastating. The writer says she felt both anguish and peace simultaneously and couldn't reconcile the two. That's not contradiction. That's just what grief is.
Closure is not a deliverable. You can plan the death down to the hour and still find yourself two years later getting blindsided by a hardware store, a specific smell, a song that comes on in a grocery store aisle. The good death gets you to the door. It doesn't tell you what's on the other side.
That's not an argument against pursuing a good death. It's an argument for being honest about what it can and can't do.
The Estate That Wasn't in Order: Practical Grief Is Still Grief
Dead Dads covers the full range of what follows a loss, including the stuff nobody puts on a sympathy card. The paperwork marathon. The garage full of things your dad swore were useful. The password-protected iPad that now guards a decade of photos and contacts nobody can access. These aren't side issues to the grief — they run directly through the middle of it.
When a death is anticipated or planned, there's an opportunity to get these things in order. Wills can be updated. Account information can be written down somewhere findable. The garage can be sorted, or at least acknowledged. When a death is sudden, none of that happens, and a second grief layer begins immediately: probate, accounts, passwords, decisions that have to be made while you're still in shock.
A doctor quoted in a TIME piece on death and dying put it plainly when asked what makes the difference in a peaceful ending: "Fear and regret. Take those away and what's left is peace." The practical chaos that follows an unplanned estate doesn't just create logistical headaches. It feeds regret. It creates the feeling that your dad didn't trust you, or didn't think ahead, or that somehow you should have asked the right questions when you had the chance.
One reviewer on the Dead Dads website put it directly: "It's the type of pain that I bottle up and keep to myself." That's what the practical mess does — it gives the grief something to hide inside. Instead of just mourning the person, you're also mourning the conversation you didn't have, the documents you can't find, the version of the goodbye that might have been easier.
If someone in your life is aging and the door is still open, the single most useful thing you can ask them is where the paperwork is. Not because money matters more than feelings. Because sorting out the estate in the middle of acute grief is a specific kind of brutal, and doing it when everyone is calm is an act of care.
The Conversations That Happened vs. the Ones That Didn't
The relational dimension of a good death is harder to plan for and, for most men, harder to talk about. It's the difference between the things that got said and the things that didn't. The feeling of completion versus the feeling of a sentence that ended mid-word.
People who study this consistently find that the conversations families most regret not having weren't about logistics. They were about love, acknowledgment, and meaning. A father at his final breakfast table, from a Daughterhood piece, rallied to tell his grandchildren he was proud of them and that they should aim high. That moment, ordinary on the surface, became one of the things his daughter held onto. He had the chance to say it. He said it.
Many men don't get that chance with their fathers. Some got fathers who didn't know how to say it, or didn't try, or ran out of time before either side figured out how to get there. If you're carrying regret about what didn't get said, that's real, and it's worth sitting with. There are ways through it — not around it — that start with naming it.
For more on navigating that specific weight, How to Forgive Yourself for the Regrets You Carry After Your Dad Died goes directly at that question.
The deeper argument here is that a good death, to the extent it's achievable, has as much to do with the relationship that preceded it as with anything that happens at the end. The lessons your dad tried to teach you while he was alive often only fully land after he's gone. The arguments that felt unresolvable sometimes resolve themselves in hindsight. The distance that felt permanent sometimes turns out to have been the kind of thing that could have been closed with a single phone call — and knowing that too late is one of grief's sharpest edges.
If you're at a stage where that phone call is still possible, make it. Not because it guarantees anything. Because the version of grief that comes after is meaningfully different from the version that doesn't.
What You're Actually Asking When You Ask If It Was Good
When someone says their loved one had a good death, what they're often really asking is: did he suffer? Was he scared? Did he feel loved? Did he know what he meant to people? Did anything important get left unsaid?
Roger's father answered most of those questions with a yes. He chose his exit. He had time to prepare. The people who mattered were there. And still, the grief arrived. Still, the date turned out to be his sister's birthday. Still, there are things that only surface after, in hardware stores and quiet moments five years later.
That's not a failure of planning. That's what grief is. It's proof that someone mattered.
What the good death does — when it's possible — is clear enough of the other wreckage so that grief can actually be grief. No estate battles. No unresolvable regrets. No conversations that can never happen now because everyone was too busy being stoic. Just the loss itself, which is already enough to carry.
For men still in the middle of sorting out what their father's death actually meant — the relationship, the lessons, the things that didn't get resolved — When Your Dad Dies Before He's Done Being Your Dad is worth reading.
And if you want to hear what it actually sounds like when men talk honestly about all of it — the practical, the emotional, the uncomfortable, and the occasionally absurd — that's exactly what Dead Dads is for. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or start at Apple Podcasts or Spotify.