[Shaun @ Tru6]

He made the decision as he had made so many others, with a firmness that few of us, I think, could have summoned.

“I sat in my medical recliner and cried and cried and cried for hours,” he said. “And then I got up and started working on it.”

He fixed a date at the end of January to move, and began filling up his remaining days — with friends, plays, final visits with his New York doctors, trips to Cincinnati to engage and begin treatment from his new team. His new apartment, in an independent living building, would be twice the size of the one he was leaving. By mid-December, when he had 40 days to go, he announced that he had filled every time slot.

On a visit upstate he made snow angels in his pajamas; in New York he pushed his walker through Times Square on New Year’s Eve.



What Is a Good Life?

More than 300,000 American men will receive diagnoses of prostate cancer this year, and more than 30,000 American men will die from it, more than from any cancer except lung cancer. Some will die surrounded by friends or loved ones; others alone.

If there is such a thing as a good death, perhaps it is this: one that comes at the end of a life spent preparing for it, by forming close relationships and living as if time is limited. And if there is a model for a good life, I realized watching Brian, perhaps it begins with these preparations.

On the day before the move to Ohio, he spent the afternoon in his apartment of 30 years, savoring a last look out the windows. “It’s what I looked at all through the pandemic,” he said. “It’s what I’ve looked at through relationships, dinner parties, hip replacements, chemo.”

The next morning, it took movers less than three hours to remove all traces of him from the apartment. In his car, Brian carried his meds in a container the size of a small aquarium.

Several times over the preceding months, I had asked Brian how he imagined his end. Though raised in an observant Catholic home, he did not believe in an afterlife. The end, he said, will be the end.

“I do know that at some point I will be a guy in a bed with people coming to say goodbye,” he said one day. It pained him that he would cause them sadness, he said, but that was the nature of love. “And I just hope they have the good sense to bring me a Maker’s Mark Manhattan and a bottle of Amarone.”

There was a dash of theater in the remark, and maybe nostalgia — by then, Brian’s body had made it unpleasant to drink alcohol. But it was also pure Brian: to conjure a last hang with friends or relatives, envisioning the moment as a shared pleasure.

He mentioned the funeral for his grandmother, who lived all her life in her childhood home and ventured out mainly to the parish across the street.

“But when I went to Cincinnati for her funeral, the church, a big church, was standing room only,” Brian said. “And I thought, this quiet woman who rarely traveled outside a one-mile radius touched all of these people. And I thought how nice that was — that you can be a simple person, living a simple life, and affect all these people. So when I die, if there’s a big room full of people crying and laughing and grieving, in a weird way, it’s kind of a nice achievement.”

As he packed his last things for the 600-mile drive to his new home, that day seemed far off. “I want to be here on earth as long as I can possibly be here,” he said. “But I’m not afraid of death. Honestly, death is what gives value to this life. You know, being here. This is it.”

It was the kind of truism that took on sinew coming from a person with a terminal illness. Brian delivered it with relish.

“So enjoy it, suckers,” he said, and he laughed to wake the dead.