Member-only story
When the Death Watch is in a Mirror
Not everybody has signed on to the jihad against opioid drugs. There are dissenters, and I am one, although I’m absolutely on board with making those who lie about opioids pay for the resulting harm.
We among the lucky — or unlucky — few who are allowed to contemplate the end of our lives spend a great deal of that limited time contemplating the beginning, remembering with varying degrees of accuracy, telling stories.
How do I know that? How can I speak for anybody but myself?
That’s a fair objection. In the last couple of years, I’ve sat through nursing home hospice with two elderly relatives as cancer took them away slowly and, forty years or so ago, with two of my generation in home hospice. Likewise, cancer.
That makes a sample of five, me included, and there’s no way that’s an adequate sample to generalize about the entire human race. So, I stand corrected, but the urge to find stories in the rearview mirror remains.
The more recent cancer victims were “the mothers,” mine and my wife’s. It’s understandable they would share memories with their offspring. And I must confess that my two favorite stories from the death watches of Pat and David…
