Especially powerful for me was
> My dad didn’t have a tidy ending. I won’t. And neither will you. Our lives will not be a slow positive upward slope before we die in our sleep surrounded by our loved ones.
> My dad didn’t have a tidy ending. I won’t. And neither will you. Our lives will not be a slow positive upward slope before we die in our sleep surrounded by our loved ones.
——
> There's one thing that's real clear to me: No one dies with dignity
For the longest time I thought it wasn’t possible. I’d read Simone de Beauvoir’s Une mort très douce, where she chronicles her mother’s death, and the conclusion is more or less that even with a live well fulfilled we all end up raging against the dying of the light (a reference to Dylan Thomas). It sounded very reasonable to me. But now I know it does not have to be like that.