The Things I Feared Most To Write

Last July, as you recall, I was dying. I was in a soulless corporate hospital, trying and failing to recover from emergency surgery. Some of my vital organs had become ‘septic’; raging with infection. I was fading.

I had been denied food and water for five days; I had been told by a plethora of oddly detached nurses, who spoke without expression, that I would soon be on a respirator. Unable to muster the will to fight much longer, I asked God to please give me more time.

My doctor, spurred to in...