Stopping for Death

Posted 6:00 AM by Gerald So

Inspired by Emily Dickinson, I intend this entry title to be accepting, not blunt. My brother and I are going to a nurse cousin's wake this afternoon. Her husband, a dentist, had a heart transplant a year or two ago, and somewhere in that time looking after him and their daughters, she was diagnosed with cancer and, like my mother, needed a pleural catheter at the end.

As bad as I feel for my cousins' loss, I know death is also something of a relief. Cancer ravages the body, but it doesn't get the spirit. I mean the soul for believers, but I also mean one's personality in life, what everyone remembers.