IN his book Being Mortal, the surgeon Atul Gawande writes about a moment when he was asked if a woman suffering from multiple organ failure was dying. “I didn’t know how to answer the question,” he recalls. “I wasn’t even sure what the word ‘dying’ meant anymore. In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.”

We can see that difficulty reflected on almost a daily basis in our media. It is there in the legal battle that raged around the fate of poor Archie Evans, the 23-month-old boy who suffered from a neurodegenerative disease who died eight days ago. It was there in last week’s appeal court bid by motor neurone disease sufferer Noel Conway to be allowed to enlist help from medical professionals to bring about a "dignified" death.

Medicine has brought us to a place where one of the biggest remaining human rights battles revolves around death. What we really perceive as living, and what we really perceive as dying, is key here - since to some extent the ability to keep a body functioning is increasingly in our control.

This is an arena in which religion has a lot to say. Christianity, in particular, wants to own this debate. But the problem is so many of its more vocal campaigners are locked in a language that predates the technology we have now. Medical science has rendered some religious arguments less relevant. Life may indeed still be sacred to most of us, but, in fact, it feels as if there is something not very sacred in keeping a body that can’t function independently - that perhaps only suffers - alive for a long time.

Meanwhile, compassion is what we need more of – and from all sides. Particularly from those who, in the name of their religious beliefs, jump in when there is a case such as Alfie Evans. One of the most horrifying things about the fuss around both Evans and Charlie Gard, the subject of a similar battle last year, has been the way in which these personal tragedies have become so hugely politicised, with too many people using them – from the Pope to American politicians - to make their own points.

The influence of certain Christian groups is particularly troubling. Last week it was announced that a legal watchdog was looking into the role of the Christian Legal Centre (CLC) in the Alfie Evans case. They intend to look at the conduct of Pavel Stroilov, a CLC legal adviser to Alfie’s parents. This comes after one high-court hearing in which Justice Hayden described Stroilov as a “fanatical and deluded young man”. That same court also heard that Stroilov was allegedly behind a plan for father Tom Evans to pursue private murder prosecutions against the doctors.

When we talk of “murder” by the very people who have been keeping a person alive, we fail to engage with the world we now live in. Rather than finding new ways to think and talk about our relationship with death, and, indeed, living, we are hobbled by an old frame of thinking.

We need to look to those who intimately understand that place where medicine meets death to evolve a new way of thinking. That, however, doesn’t mean that there are not many good reasons to be cautious about the right-to die. As Atul Gawande has put it: “The goal is not a good death; the goal is as good a life as possible all the way to the very end. And if we start thinking, well, a good death is what we want, then you start euthanising people who have life to live.”

THANKS CLINTONS, BUT I DON'T NEED AN ED BALLS DAY CARD

THE best way, I used to think, to get away from the nonsense on the internet was to spend more time in the real world. Now I realise the real world is starting to ape the internet – particularly its shallows. The full horror of this was brought home last week, when it was announced that Clinton Cards was creating an Ed Balls Day card. Come Ed Balls day in Spring 2019, you’ll be able to send a loved one a printed card in celebration of Ed’s 2011 balls up.

Lest you have forgotten, this key day in the calendar is the product of the social media age – born on that fateful day when the politician was standing in a real-life supermarket juggling a few things and accidentally tweeted simply the name “Ed Balls”. Hence Ed Balls Day stands for something about our human fallibility in these online times. Yes, it was funny. We laughed ... didn't we? Though maybe not quite enough to make us want to send a card about it.

Clinton Cards, however – always willing to cash in on anything that looks like a celebration – seems to think that some of us must want to. They have created a whole range of cards in honour of the kind of events that we use as light relief on social media. For some time they have had a Star Wars Day range and are considering other “newcasions”, including International Respect For Chickens Day (I'm not joking) and Crouton Day (again, I am not joking). I shall probably be planning my own International Respect for Greetings Cards Day, for which I will be making the cards myself.