I was listening to an interview with a palliative nurse, who provided his insights into end-of-life care. He stressed that the most important thing to his charges was that they felt complete.
It struck me that this was a fascinating choice of word. Finished would be a synonym, but seemingly inappropriate. Done, would be another poor word choice. As would be finalize.
Fulfil would be another great word to use, as fulfillment has an appropriate patina of finality. Complete, has a similarly, situationally positive, connotation.
If I was in the same shoes, I might say, we should aspire not to feel complete, as much as completed. Accomplished would be a synonym, but like the above, the aspirational connotation in this setting would be counter descriptive. Achieve is another description that we might strive for.
However, completed intimates that you have done, what you have set out to do, and what you could do. I think that would provide peace to someone. Having finished, what you could have done is an accomplishment that feels completing.
I don’t mean any of this to sound depressing. Completing should be the opposite; it should feel fulling. In our work, in our research, in our papers and in our careers to not just feel complete, but that you have completed- a project, an idea, or a theory is not a bad epitaph.
Mark E. Schweitzer, MD
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Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Volume 64, Issue 4
October 2026
First Published: 15 September 2026
A 58-year-old woman with invasive carcinoma of no special type in the right breast. (A) Axial T2-weighted image; (B) Axial contrast-enhanced T1-weighted image; (C) Stiffness maps (c) derived from 10-frequency MRE, matched to the same anatomical slice as the contrast-enhanced sequence. After systematic multi-dimensional image quality evaluation, stiffness map reconstructed from the 40–70 Hz frequency range achieved the best overall performance across all assessment indicators. By Ma et al. (1089–1101).
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