A Living Remedy: A Memoir

by Nicole Chung

This is a country that takes little responsibility for the health and well-being of its citizens while urging us to blame each other—and ourselves—for our precarity under an exploitative system in which all but a small number of us stand to suffer or lose much. A country that first abandons and then condemns people without money who have the temerity to get sick, accusing them of causing their own deaths. It is still hard for me not to think of my father’s death as a kind of negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the state’s failure to fulfill its most basic responsibilities to him and others like him. With our broken safety net, our strained systems of care and support, the deep and corrosive inequalities we have yet to address, it’s no wonder that so many of us find ourselves alone, struggling to get the help we need when we or our loved ones are suffering.

What killed my father, on paper, was diabetes and kidney failure: common indeed, the eighth- and tenth-leading causes of death in the United States in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control. But failing organs, life-threatening infections, death in his sixties—these were not inevitable outcomes, nor matters of pure chance and inheritance, an avalanche of genetic misfortune. He needed access to quality health care in order to manage and treat his illnesses. He needed it throughout his life, not only in his final years, when it was granted as a crisis response only after his kidneys had failed. His mother lived longer and had greater access to life-prolonging treatment in the 1960s and 1970s than her son had in the twenty-first century.

Buster the dog, as I’ve learned in our brief acquaintance, might as well be her child; he is spoiled and completely devoted to her. Making his dinner is a several-step process that both my husband and I learned with my mother criticizing us at every step. “Dan, would you consider that a heaping scoop?” “He can’t eat it dry, you need to add some hot water so it makes a kind of gravy, and where are the meat scraps I saved to put on top?” Before my mother leaves the house, she turns on the television—always PBS—in the hopes that he will find the voices comforting and feel less lonely. (“Why PBS?” I asked her. “Well, I figure it’s at least semi-educational.”)