He was asking me to let him die as a person who was loved, rather than a file that was closed.
And I found that I could not, in good conscience, refuse a man that.
I had learned, over a year of sitting with the dying, exactly how much that request meant, and why it was not strange at all, though it looked strange from outside.
Because I had watched, again and again, the particular indignity of a lonely death, and it had taught me something our culture works hard not to look at: that the worst part of dying alone is not the physical solitude, but the erasure.
When a person dies with no one, they do not simply die unaccompanied.
They die as a case, a bed number, a set of forms, a body to be processed by a system that is efficient and kind but fundamentally impersonal.
