What does dying feel like? Science is Just Beginning to Understand the Experience of Life’s End. “Do you want to know what will happen as your body starts shutting down?” My mother and I sat across from the hospice nurse in my parents’ Colorado home. It was 2005, and my mother had reached the end of treatments for metastatic breast cancer. A month or two earlier, she’d been able to take the dog for daily walks in the mountains and travel to Australia with my father. Now, she was weak, exhausted from the disease and chemotherapy and pain medication. My mother had been the one to decide, with her doctor’s blessing, to stop…