We read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal together. Its clarity on end-of-life care shakes through me like a summer storm. I give the book to everyone I know. Much of Gawande’s discussion revolves around the decision to stop treatment for cancers that seem to be relentlessly unbackdownable. Many of the stories he tells there—including his own father’s death from a spinal tumor—are hard to read. But what he is working toward in his difficult exploration is unquestionably beautiful: how to distill what matters most to each of us in life in order to navigate our way toward the edge of it in a
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I feel like that is what my mom would say.
