"On a sunny and warmish late-November day, my husband and I were meeting some close relatives to deposit our brother-in-law's ashes in a columbarium beside the remains of his late wife, my husband's only sibling. She had died during the pandemic, and her husband had subsequently moved away, but none of us were going to let the grim reaper separate a couple who had been conjoined by a lifetime of shared experiences."
"As a hematologist, he had always been an incisive decision maker. We had talked several times about aging and dying based on what he had learned from taking care of patients. He knew how he wanted to live and how he wanted to die: on his own terms."
The narrator describes a winter routine of cautious walking with a cane, prompting assumptions about joint replacement surgery. Instead, the injury stems from a cemetery incident while depositing a brother-in-law's ashes alongside his deceased wife's remains. The couple had been married since the late 1940s and shared a lifetime together. The brother-in-law, a hematologist, had previously discussed end-of-life preferences and autonomous decision-making regarding aging and dying. The narrator, experienced in writing about assisted dying, reflects on this intersection of family ritual, mortality, and the unexpected physical consequences of commemorating loss.
Read at The Walrus
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