One by one, all those voices around me—the ones that definitively knew they would be gone from this earth in weeks or months—described the things they wanted most from their final days. Their answers were different and yet the same. They wanted time. To make good on old grudges. To relive their favorite days. To laugh. To love. Not one of them spoke about uprooting her whole life, of starting over or tearing down walls or chasing old professional ambitions or turning everything in her world on its head. Rather, every woman’s dying wish was to simply spend her final days—however many of them
...more
