I knew it was coming.  The last several phone conversations that I had with my sister were labored, troubling.  With our last conversation she was unable to finish a sentence.  I could not help her,  as her mind no longer responded to verbal encouragement.

An excerpt from Robert A. Heinlein was sent to me by a friend.  A sentence struck me with particular impact.

“In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots.”

To translate those words into common English, each of us is a member of the human race, first and foremost.  The idea of “the individual” is an abstraction, useful for legal or ideological purposes.  We belong to one another in ways that we cannot fathom.  We are entailed in the teachers, neighbors, friends, and I must not forget our parents, with whom we interact, for mutual good, or for mutual evil.  Why be coy, and avoid the brutal logic of the matter?  We help one another or we hurt one another.  The logic is applied, spectrum like.  Few have the capacity of a saint or that of a lost and craven soul.  Most of us are in the middle.  And this entanglement is not limited to our one life time, but extends rhizome-like, from the time of our grandparents and their forebears.  The conversations never end.  Nothing is over and done with.

If life is on balance tolerably good, maybe extraordinary, —  many have contributed.  And if a life is demonstrably horrific, — the same can be said.

So two doctors conversed with me, with my brother and his wife  — advising that hospice care is the best option for my sister.

I knew this day was coming, and the knowing makes it no less sad.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in humanity

       —  John Donne  1572 – 1631