"But I just was awake, and I could hear them breathing. And it just struck me that, you know, they seemed, to me, quite old, and I knew old people died and that when that breath stopped, then I would lose them, you know? And I had nobody to ask about that, and I just lay there thinking about it."
"As Boone dies, he is visited by a series of ghosts, everyone from the French inventor of the internal combustion engine, who has arrived at Boone's deathbed seeking justice, to an earnest woman named Jill with one primary task. SAUNDERS: Her self-appointed mission is to go around comforting all these different people who are at death's door. She feels like she's supposed to come into these rooms and somehow help these people with the transition."
A childhood moment at age seven in a grandparents' house produced an urgent awareness of mortality upon hearing their breathing and imagining its end. That early experience fostered a lasting love-hate relationship with life's finitude and a continuing exploration of ghosts and death. Vigil centers on K.J. Boone, an oil tycoon who undercut climate science, dying while visited by a sequence of ghosts, including the French inventor of the internal combustion engine seeking justice and a woman named Jill whose mission is to comfort and aid people at death's door.
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]