Active treatment of patients with “incurable disease”: what’s the point?

What is active treatment of patients with “incurable disease”? I believe that it is not limited to the care of the patients’ symptoms, but goes further. We can and must control pain, breathlessness, nausea and vomiting, intestinal obstruction, insomnia… but something else remains for us to face, something paradoxically made more evident by the absence of symptoms: the patients’ emotional suffering, suffering deep in their heart, the most hidden, but which becomes apparent in the season of death. So, what can we do? We must be able to understand their needs and to stay with them, protecting the uniqueness of their person in the face of an imminent death.