"'Gone'? Where? Perhaps Hawaii? Is he feeling better?" which is completely uncool.
This isn't a derail, really--you just reminded me of the
Scrubs episode where the intern JD must tell one of his favorite patients that she's dying and all he can do is fumble out, "We're going to keep you as comfortable as possible." She wants to know why, and he says something like, "For the big, bright place you're going? The um, comfortable place? With big puffy clouds, where you get to see all your friends?" And she says, "Oh,
Seattle?" It's funny, but it's kind of not.
In the last couple of years there has been a fairly explicit directive in residency training to give physicians some skills in delivering bad news, and to counsel medical students about initially dealing with death. I think these are moves in the right direction--the less freighted this issue is for physicians, the more clearly they can communicate with dying patients and their families.