Death and Dignity Theme Analysis

Cate Kennedy’s short story “Laminex and Mirrors” features an Australian teenager who begins a friendship with a man named Mr. Moreton, an elderly veteran dying of lung cancer, as she navigates her first few days as a hospital cleaner. The teenager, who is also the unnamed narrator of the story, describes the hospital as a site heavy with the inevitability of death. Her descriptions of Mr. Moreton in particular demonstrate the grim and often demoralizing nature of end-of-life care. By tracing the narrator’s exposure to this environment, and her ultimate response to the difficult circumstances her new friend must face, Kennedy argues for the importance of allowing those who are dying to experience agency and dignity in their final days.

Cate Kennedy’s language in “Laminex and Mirrors” paints the narrator’s new workplace as a sterile, cheerless place in which the terminally ill await their eventual deaths. Moreover, she employs Mr. Moreton’s character to demonstrate the ways in which certain features of the hospital and its procedures contribute to feelings of melancholy and dehumanization in its patients. The narrator describes the sick patients plodding along the hospital corridors as “the slow, measured perambulation of those with an endless, unvarying stretch in front of them.” Even the bathroom in an old wing of the hospital, which is slated for demolition (and thus, perhaps another suggestion of lifelessness), reminds the narrator that patients of that wing once spent a great deal of time listening to the sound of leaky taps, and “listen[ed] to that nocturnal dripping like a relentless echoing clock, marking their time left.” Though a hospital is clearly intended to function as a site of recovery and healing, these moments draw a clear association between the hospital and the omnipresence of death.

While talking with the narrator, Mr. Moreton remarks that he is not sure if the matron of the hospital or his lung cancer will kill him first. He is joking in this scene, but his comment emphasizes that he finds the matron’s policies—such as denying him the choice to smoke a cigarette or chat with a friendly hospital employee in the final days of his life—stifling and demeaning. When the narrator begins her job, she initially obeys the matron’s policies, but after seeing Mr. Moreton’s entire demeanor brighten after having his first bath in years, she is inspired to disobey them entirely. When she suggests to Mr. Moreton that he put on some aftershave before his family arrives at the hospital, he asks her to pass the bottle over to him, saying cheerfully, “Why not […] Pass it over here!” She notes that in that moment, “it’s the recklessness in his voice that decides me.” In asking Mr. Moreton if he’d like to put on some aftershave, the narrator gives Mr. Moreton a small moment of agency, which he laps up eagerly. The energy, zest, and “recklessness” in Mr. Moreton’s voice shakes the narrator out of the routines and expectations of her job and reminds her of the importance of making her charges feel like they still have dignity and some semblance of independence even within the confines of the hospital walls.

When she begins to understand the way in which the environment of the hospital impacts employees and patients alike, the narrator decides that providing her new friend a single morning of autonomy and dignity is worth the risk. When she finally provides Mr. Moreton with his treasured cigarettes—which he has been asking for, unsuccessfully, every day—she symbolically asserts her decision to give him a moment of dignity as he approaches death. Though Mr. Moreton has lung cancer and smoking a cigarette—the culprit of his sickness—most certainly will not help, the narrator allows him to make that choice by himself. Furthermore, after bathing and clothing Mr. Moreton, the narrator observes that he looks handsome, and that he has become “like a different man with a cigarette in his hand.” Mr. Moreton affirms this, remarking that he feels “bloody great.” In breaking the rules to give Mr. Moreton a real bath in a bathtub—instead of forcing him to shower sitting in a plastic chair as is hospital protocol—the narrator treats Mr. Moreton with dignity, and essentially transforms the man with this small act.

The fact that a single morning brings about such a marked change in Mr. Moreton suggests the power of the narrator’s commitment to treating her patients with respect and trying to give them some sense of agency over their lives. As the narrator takes Mr. Moreton back inside the hospital after “breaking him out” for a smoke, the pair appear temporarily transformed. Though their relationship was punctuated by moments of awkwardness before, and their escape characterized by moments of fear and anxiety, they greet their likely punishment with grace. Describing the way in which they enter the hospital’s front doors, the narrator notes, “Mr. Moreton's shoulders go back and his chin lifts and we're clipping along now, left right left, there's no way I'm going to do him the disservice of skulking in, it's up and over the top for us.” A sense of confidence as well as a sense of dignity is present in the characters’ physical posture here, as well as the narrator’s powerful claim that “there’s no way” she will let Mr. Moreton down.

Though the narrator of “Laminex and Mirrors” begins her work as a hospital cleaner thinking only of when she will quit, she is quickly affected by the vulnerability and humanity of those she works with. She is also struck by evidence that the environment of a hospital does not always provide its patients what they need to feel respected or feel like themselves. Although the narrator is taught to adhere to policies that deprive Mr. Moreton of the ability to make his own choices and retain his dignity as he approaches death, she decides that she has the ability and the motivation to prioritize his dignity over those regulations.