All Death Matters

by Felix Cheong

You can dodge taxes (as many successful people have done). But the one fact you can’t avoid is death.

Yet among Asians, we often wave away the word as if saying it aloud might bring on the death throes. No talk of wills, end-of-life care or funeral planning. Heck, we can’t even pen our autobiographies. At my memoir-writing workshop last year, one participant said his wife had tried to stop him from signing up because she believed writing your life story meant you were ready to give up the ghost!

Which makes All Death Matters an unusual and unusually useful book—a conversation starter that might, with luck, start a conversion in attitude.

Written and illustrated by Singapore artist James Tan, the graphic novel was commissioned by the philanthropic organization Lien Foundation to spark “die-logues”—and as puns go, this one is more a wince than a wink—about palliative care. The book is part of the Foundation’s Life Before Death initiative, launched in 2006 to destigmatise death and improve care for the dying.

All Death Matters is its first graphic novel devoted to end-of-life care. But the questions the comic raises are anything but comic.

How long should doctors keep someone alive when treatment itself brings suffering? Who gets to decide when the patient can no longer speak for himself? Is prolonging life the same thing as preserving it?

Profound questions that could easily have become confounding, but Tan gives them a pulse, a human shape.

At the centre of the story is Dr Tan, a young hospital doctor confronted with an elderly patient dying from terminal cancer. Treatment is no longer working, yet the patient’s family cannot agree on the next course of action. One family member wants medical intervention to continue. Another recognizes that extra time buys nothing but pain.

Despite the shared surname, there is no suggestion that Dr Tan is illustrator James Tan himself in scrubs. The character’s predicament draws on the real-life experiences of healthcare professionals in Singapore, giving him the quality of a representative young doctor rather than an authorial stand-in.

Doctors in comics are often given near-magical agency: diagnose the disease, find the treatment, save the patient. Here, Dr Tan knows the medicine but little about anticipatory grief. He cannot simply prescribe his way out of the problem.

His uncertainty reflects real-life experience. A 2025 study of clinical-year medical students at the National University of Singapore found that many lacked the confidence in palliative care and felt they had insufficient exposure to caring for dying patients and their families.

And hovering over the argument is another uncomfortable question: whose life is being prolonged—the patient’s, or the family’s reluctance to let him go?

The answer is more complicated than simply leaving it to the doctor. In Singapore, a patient who still has mental capacity should have his wishes taken into account. If he no longer does, an Advance Medical Directive or Advance Care Plan can help guide treatment; otherwise, clinicians work with family members and caregivers to determine what’s in the patient’s best interests.

That is where All Death Matters matters as graphic medicine. It is less interested in teaching us what death looks like than showing what decision-making around death feels like: messy, guilt-ridden and frequently delayed until everyone is too emotional—or exhausted—to think clearly.

Tan wisely resists turning his main character into some heroic spokesman for palliative care. The doctor is young, inexperienced and still working out where medicine ends and mortality begins. His struggle feels genuine precisely because he does not have a ready answer tucked into his white coat.

The artist also gives Dr. Tan a backstory, linking his present dilemma—not his alone, but one shared with the family—to his own experience of loss. This humanises him, though the final revelation asks a little too much of the reader.

Spoiler alert—skip the next paragraph if you don’t want the reveal.

We discover that the dying patient had once tried to save Dr Tan’s father after a car accident. It is meant to knot the two lives together. For me, the coincidence feels contrived, adding melodrama to a story that does not need it. Death itself already carries enough dramatic weight.

Visually, Tan keeps things straightforward. His figures are simply drawn, sometimes almost cartoonishly so. The dying man’s children, for instance, remind me of Beavis and Butt-Head—and they do argue like that duo too.

But the simplicity serves and sells the story. There is little visual grandstanding, which allows the ethical questions to stay front and center. The family wrestles with what is best for their father; Dr Tan wrestles with what medicine can—or should—do. When the focus turns inward, the panels often give him considerable breathing room. Empty space opens around him, as if the moral dilemma itself exhales into it.

Unpaginated, All Death Matters

 In lesser hands, much of the book could have become exposition. After all, All Death Matters is a public-service project. The danger with such commissioned work is that characters become talking-head pamphlets. Tan mostly avoids that.

The book certainly wants to teach. But it first wants us to care about the people caught inside the lesson. That distinction matters: empathy precedes persuasion. The medicine, however bitter, goes down without sugarcoating it.

The book’s greatest achievement is therefore not that it supplies answers. It doesn’t pretend to. Rather, it makes room for questions that many of us would rather leave unsaid until somebody in our family is dying.

Heavy questions, no doubt. But All Death Matters carries them lightly enough for us to keep turning the pages. For a book about dying, that is quite a way of keeping the conversation alive.

Felix Cheong is a Singapore-based author who has published 33 books across different genres, including eleven graphic novels. He is the author of the graphic medicine books In the Year of the Virus – A Poignant Look Back at the Time When the World Was Affected by the Coronavirus (art by Eko) and A Mild Case of Mass Hysteria (illustrated by Ritwick Roy & Riddhi Trivedi). In January 2027, Felix will publish another graphic medicine book, Opium: A War Story (art by Cheah Sinann). It’s about opium addiction and two Singapore doctors who start an anti-opium movement in 1905.