I was seventy-three years old when the truth finally settled over me like a cold, heavy blanket: I was going to die alone. It wasn’t the illness that scared me — the doctors had been honest from the start. My heart was failing, my lungs were weakening, and my bones felt like they were made of thin, brittle glass.
Death didn’t frighten me; I had seen enough of it overseas, in deserts and cities whose names my children never bothered to learn. What terrified me was something far quieter, far crueler: Silence.
The silence that filled the hospice room in the late afternoons. The silence that echoed after the nurses changed shifts. The silence that followed every day my children did not walk through the door. Three of…
