2022-03-07
1 小时 0 分钟You cannot disregard people's faults, and you can't expect them to change.
You know, we meet each other, we're kind of all pretty much cooked, and you can work on your behavior, but you're not going to change your nature.
And so it always seems to me that if you pick somebody and you spend the next 20 years saying, be different, you know, that's on you.
You picked the wrong person.
As he must have said a million times, I'm going to die on my feet, not live on my knees, which was just his nature.
At Brian's memorial, this guy who played football with him in high school said to me, nobody ever knocked you down harder or put out a hand faster to pull you up.
He knew who he was.
So what does it actually mean to have a good death?
Well, if you're like most people, the very question, simply by the nature of it, it scares you.
In fact, you may be about to tune out to this episode at this very moment simply because I posed it.
And I'm going to urge you to stay with me because there are things we all need to think about, to feel, to know.
Because in no small way, the idea of a good death is an essential part of the conversation that we have been having for the last decade about living a good life.
But if we never talk about it, if we never feel into it and have open, honest, sometimes hard, but deeply meaningful conversations around it, well, then we leave our final act largely to fate or to the will of others.
And to the extent that when it comes time, we have some level of agency at a moment where, and this is a critical distinction, we're of sound mind, fully supported and well informed.
It's important to know what are the things to consider, what are the unknowns, and how much of any of it is really in our hands.
These are the questions and circumstances that my guest, acclaimed author, screenwriter, and teacher Amy Bloom, were presented with when her beloved husband was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's in his sixties and quickly made a decision that, in his words, the long goodbye was not for him.
The time that followed it was marked by no small amount of suffering, not just because of the looming loss of a beloved, but because the landscape that confronted them when seeking to do it their way was a bit brutalizing.
The experience is laid bare in an achingly beautiful and also stunningly eye opening way in Amy's new book, in Love, a memoir of love and loss.
This is not necessarily an easy conversation, but it is an incredibly important one.
And I am so grateful for Amy's openness and vulnerability and wisdom in both sharing her story and in guiding this conversation.