Joachim’s story reveals that, despite residents’ outwardly casual attitude toward death, a fear of one’s own mortality (especially when it’s imminent, as in Barbara’s case) is engrained in all humans. Behrens’s advice to dying patients not to “make such a fuss” might seem cold and detached, but perhaps it’s also helpful: death comes to the dying (a group to which all humans, even those who are presently young and healthy, belong) regardless of how they respond to it, and so isn’t it better to accept rather than resist one’s fate?