Part 1 was twenty years ago, just after a trip to Manhattan. “What makes your life worth living” was posed at the end and recent events have me wondering again. This year has been a motherfucker, but this post isn’t even about Trump. In mid-January, my mom fell at home, thus beginning an odyssey of overcrowded, brightly-lit emergency room hallways, nursing home rehabs, and drugs – for pain, twitching muscles, infection, water retention, and pain. Did I mention pain? How much pain could you endure before you’d want to tap out?

My life has been so damned easy relative to most. Some of the faces Beth and I saw while walking the concrete canyons of NYC this week were etched with pain or some hard-living equivalent. We wondered about their stories. For those more fortunate, there was hard work and likely low pay. Beth noted, “It takes a lot of workers to run this city.” When I began working in 1974, the minimum wage was $1.60. Fifty-one years later it’s $7.25. Just to keep up with inflation, my ’74 rate should now be $12.29. As I interacted with or observed the hotel front desk clerk, men carrying racks of produce, others digging a hole on 7th Avenue, guides at the Empire State Building, and a man sweeping up trash in the gutter fronting a hotel, I wondered where they lived and how they survived. If they received a medical death sentence, would they fight for their life? Would their life be worth living?

My oldest cousin visited my mom in February. We chatted in the hospital room. As she prepared to leave, a phone call summoned her to her sisters where the younger was experiencing some kind of seizure. Hours later my text was responded with, “She died.” Five weeks later, the male sibling of the family died. On March 8th, he checked himself out of the hospital after a diagnosis of liver cancer. Three days later he was gone. He was ashen and frail at his sister’s services, so the news of his illness wasn’t surprising, but the swift end was. It seems he may have concluded, “Fuck this. I’m out.” I don’t know.

My mom got her Nursing degree while I was in high school. A paper she wrote back then was on euthanasia. She was a proponent. I think Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s book, “On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families” influenced her position. At the darkest point in January, and while delirious from an infection, Mom pointed at something she saw above her and in a shaky whisper said, “This is hell.” She couldn’t tell me what. I researched assisted suicide. It’s not legal in Massachusetts. It is in Vermont, but you must be a citizen. As recovery progressed, I sensed a reset from her view on assisted suicide. Despite the chronic pain, my mother finds life worth living. For what? Her children? Grandchildren and great-grandchildren? Watching the Masters? Cooking shows? Chatting with her daughter-in-law? The tomato plant we’ll bring in May? The Maple Walnut ice cream we’ll take her for in July?

Yeah. All of it.