He was afraid. Not of what happens after death, which he believed was only biological. He was afraid of the moment when biology stopped his body, afraid of some unthinkable pain that would occur at just that last moment. He did not choose to rage. The doctors at a Bronx hospital simply increased the morphine and he slept into what we call Death. I promised him it would be that way, but I don't know. I only know what monitors report, and they show no measurement of anything like the pain he feared.
The cancer docs ask us what they can do, about their patients' fear, about their own failure of hope. And is that what hope is? The belief that doctors can heal? Heal a body that belongs to this illness called dying, that comes in so many different forms we can't name them all?
Sunday, September 6, 2009
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Great! You are going to love doing this, death be damned. I signed up to be a follower.......but I took down the follower option on my own blog, because the one follower I had gathered, withdrew.
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