End-Of-Life…Death
How do we write about it?
A comment on an earlier article and my response to the reader made me contemplate how we write about death.
From a reader: You mentioned being in a fog for two years after losing your husband. At 56, I too have recently lost my husband, and I was curious how you might describe the fog you were in and how it felt to you.
Wow. I wasn’t sure I knew what to say — or how to say it.
Over the years I chronicled events in our lives: bad days at school with crazy, incompetent administrators; my frustration and anger with a narcissistic mother; our backroad adventures when we would say “what happens if we turn left?” Many times we would say, “If we get to the ocean, we’ve gone too far.”
From the aneurysm surgery in 2016 to the open-heart surgery in 2018, I put fingers to the keyboard and documented our medical adventures — which we together termed “the good, the bad, the ugly, and the ridiculous.”
I wrote about our hospice team and how the medical system had failed us for so many years, including doctors who yelled at us for asking questions.
I scribbled through tears the timeline of our pain as a couple, coming to grips with losing each other, and saying good-bye over two years of inevitability. I didn’t know that I would say good-bye all over…
