Dinner with Edward: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship

by Isabel Vincent

And as he approached his family home in Nashville, he braced himself for what he knew would be a final meeting with his father. But nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to encounter in the hospital room. “He looked, lying on that bed, like the victims we had seen in Shoah,” recalled Edward. The horrors of the Nazi Holocaust had been revealed only a decade earlier. Edward wanted to take his father off life support, to end his suffering, and tried to rally his mother, brothers, and sisters to the cause. “Fuck the hospital,” he had said to his family; this was no way for any human being to die. “He was all protruding blue veins and tubes and wires,” recalled Edward. “Tubes from plastic bags overhead fed solutions drop by drop into his veins on quivering arms and body. And from his bladder and colon, contents flowed through more tubes into pans beneath the bed. I begged the intern to remove the tubes and allow him to die with dignity, but no one listened.”