Our radically empirical attitude toward dying has led us through a survey of issues raised by different groups of adult patients. Since we are to take all and only experience, as a practical matter this means approaching patients as robust narratives, engaging their life stories and the complex interrelations to others and environment that those stories express and entail. For the most part, I have argued that this approach, while remaining contextual and social in scope and interpretation, still must promote the participation of individual patients, and attempt to champion the stories they wish to tell. While patients' stories, as expressed by them through their own voices or written directives, should not be taken as necessarily determinative, they have authorial force.

I will now turn to pediatric patients prematurely facing death – specifically to issues concerning neonatal end-of-life care. Here the presumption of patients' “authority” in their own narratives gives way to others, as these patients are still greatly underdeveloped. But then what would it mean to implement the radically empirical insights so far discussed?