Chapter 170: A Man Named André and a Hospice Nurse Named Sharon White Show Us How to Face Death
When André Ricciardi turned 50, his best friend Lee made an unusual proposition: how about they go get a colonoscopy together? The pair had reached the qualifying age for men in the US to access the health check, and Lee pictured them farting merrily on adjacent toilets while the prep medication flushed out their bowels, then chatting from hospital beds as tiny cameras traveled through their anal passages. André was always up for ridiculous stuff, but on this occasion he surprised Lee: he said no.
André had no other colonoscopy plans. He just thought it was a crazy idea, and for once, he was being sensible. That turned out to be the stupidest thing he’d ever done. Eighteen months later, perturbed by blood in his stools, André finally went for a colonoscopy. It revealed stage 4 cancer. In response, he decided to film a documentary about his own dying process. André Is an Idiot became the movie he created, and it had a good run on Netflix. André informs much of what follows.
The architecture of death — spiritual and mortal, interior and witnessed — is easier to grasp in theory than to inhabit in practice. What it looks like from inside a living room, a hospice room, a sealed documentary frame, is different from what it looks like in philosophical prose. André Ricciardi did not die according to any framework. He died the way he lived — loudly, specifically, with strong opinions about coffee and an unflinching refusal to let his personhood be reduced to his prognosis.
Alongside André stands the retired hospice nurse and my wife, Sharon White, who has witnessed more crossings than most people will ever be asked to imagine. Together, they offer something no theory can quite approximate: the actual texture of death, faced with open eyes.
There is something quietly radical about a man who faces death and does not flinch. Not because he is fearless — he isn’t — but because he refuses to perform courage on anyone else’s terms. André does not die the way we have been trained to die by the movies: gracefully, poetically, with just the right words arriving at just the right moment. He dies the way most of us actually live — messily, loudly, often hilariously, and with far more unfinished business than any of us would care to admit.
This chapter belongs to him. But it belongs, too, to Sharon White, and to the many men and women she sat beside over decades of bearing witness to the dying. What follows unfolds in two parts: first, André’s own reckoning with his dying, told largely in his own idiom; then the stories Sharon carried from her years at the bedsides of others, offered on their own terms, not as a comparison to André but as their own complete testimony. I hope, together, they bless all of us.
Before we meet André as he meets himself, it is worth understanding where his story comes from, and why I have built so much of this chapter around it.
The Documentary at the Center of This Chapter
André Is an Idiot is a documentary, that streamed on Netflix, about a man navigating terminal colorectal cancer with raw honesty, dark humor, and unexpected grace. Directed by Tony Benna, the film centers on André Ricciardi — a man who calls himself an idiot for skipping the colonoscopy that might have caught the cancer before it reached his liver — and follows his determination to meet his diagnosis with levity rather than despair. Brought partly to life through stop-motion animation, André’s journey becomes a lens through which to examine what it means to truly live.
When André first approached Benna to direct what he described as “a comedy about his cancer,” the request was disarming. Yet that framing tells you everything about the man. As one critic observed, the resulting film is “funny, sad and uncomfortable in shifting proportions” — at once an urgent public service announcement and a documentary memento mori. André’s body is betraying him in the least cinematic way imaginable, and he — despite everything, or perhaps because of everything — becomes one of the most philosophically alive figures you are likely to encounter.
His story is not a tragedy, though grief lives inside it. It is not an inspirational narrative, though it will shift something in you. It is something rarer and harder to name: an honest account of what happens when a person stops pretending that death is someone else’s appointment.
In this chapter, André’s experience forms a central narrative and emotional thread. I will use him as an avatar — a companion through whom I explore what death might mean. Later, his voice will give way entirely to Sharon White’s profound work and writings about the patients she attended in hospice care, gathered in her heartfelt book, Whose Death Is It Anyway? A Hospice Nurse Remembers. Sharon is my wife, and the stories she carries from those years have shaped, in ways both visible and invisible, the philosophical architecture of everything that follows.
How This Story Connects to the Larger Work
André’s experience does not exist in isolation. It forms one of the emotional and philosophical cores of the book this chapter belongs to: An Electrician’s Guide to the Universe, and a Life, Love, and Death Upon its Unlimited Bandwidth — a work that uses the language and logic of electricity as a metaphor for consciousness, existence, and what might persist beyond death.
The central premise is provocative. Consciousness, I have proposed, behaves less like a fixed object and more like a current — something that moves through systems, transforms, and cannot simply be switched off without becoming something else. As an electrician and student of science I understood that energy and matter are two sides of the same coin of creation. Energy is never destroyed; it changes form, is converted, is transformed. André’s dying, viewed through this framework, is not an ending but a conversion event. The bandwidth of a life — all its frequencies, its noise, its signal — does not go silent. It changes form.
This is not offered as consolation, exactly. The book, like André’s story, resists easy comfort. But it does suggest that the questions we carry about death — about what we are, where we go, whether any of it meant anything — may be questions we have been asking from an incomplete perspective. Perhaps the language of physics, of currents and fields and systems, opens new ways of sitting with the mystery.
What André’s story offers, at the center of it all, is something more useful than answers. It offers company. It offers the radical reassurance that someone else went this way before you — eyes open, personality intact, capacity for love and humor and stubbornness undiminished.
If that is what an idiot looks like, perhaps we should all aspire to such idiocy.
Part One: André’s Reckoning
I. The Man Himself
“André is an idiot.”
This is a statement uttered by André’s mother, when she was told that her son had stage 4 terminal colorectal cancer. She wondered why he hadn’t had a colonoscopy earlier — one that might have detected the cancer before it spread to his liver.
“André is an idiot.”
There is the particular tenderness that arrives only after years of knowing someone well enough to see their flaws without flinching, their absurdities without condescension, their beauty precisely because of, not despite, the mess. The title of Andre’s piece is not a verdict. It is a portrait.
André is a man with terminal colorectal cancer. He is also a man who still argues about the right way to make coffee. He is a man whose body has begun its long, unglamorous retreat from the world he has occupied with such loud, inconvenient, magnificent presence. He has not softened into sainthood at the approach of death, has not discovered some previously hidden serenity, has not — thank God — learned to speak in the hushed, reverential tones we have culturally assigned to the dying.
He is, stubbornly, still André. And that stubbornness is the most profound thing about him.
II. The Compression of Time
André’s arguments about coffee — the temperature of the water, the coarseness of the grind, the specific injustice of those who use pod machines and call the result coffee — are not trivial in the way that word is typically meant. They are the fingerprint of a particular person, pressed into the world right up until the last available moment.
The terminal diagnosis is its own compression event, collapsing the future into a much smaller space and forcing a reckoning with what precisely fills it. And André — being André — fills it with argument, with laughter, with the specific gravity of a man who has decided, consciously or not, that there will be no rehearsal for any of this.
III. Refusing the Graceful Exit
Death is not a performance, and there is no way to live forever in the body that we now inhabit.
André’s version of stripping-down is less confrontational but no less complete. He observes. He notices things. The quality of afternoon light through a hospital window. The specific way that time behaves differently when you know how much of it remains. The absurdity of institutional coffee served in a context where, arguably, good coffee matters more than it ever has before. His noticing is a form of insistence — a refusal to stop registering the world simply because the world has decided to stop including him.
André is refusing, in his own idiom, to go quietly. He is refusing the performance of a good death — serene, accepting, spiritually resolved — that the cultural script seems to demand. He is, stubbornly, himself.
This is rarer than it sounds. The pressure to die well, to manage one’s dying in a way that does not inconvenience or disturb the people one is leaving behind, is enormous and largely invisible. André has declined the role of graceful exit. And in doing so, he has left more space for everyone around him to be real, too.
Part Two: Sharon’s Witness
My wife, Sharon White, spent four decades as a nurse, the final ten years as a hospice nurse. In that time, she sat with the dying in a way most of us are never asked to do. She bore witness — a term I will return to often in these pages, because it is not a passive one. She has written her own account of those years in Whose Death Is It Anyway? A Hospice Nurse Remembers, and the stories she carries have shaped, in ways both visible and invisible, the philosophical architecture of this book.
In the pages that follow, I want to let those stories stand in their own right and not universalized into abstraction. They are simply as what they are: a record of what death looks like from inside the room, told by the one who stayed and witnessed.
IV. Learning to Die: The Education No One Offers
There is no curriculum for dying. No one sits you down in school and explains how it is done. You are not given a practice run, a dress rehearsal, a chance to study from someone who has been through it and come back to report. The information available to us is second-hand, filtered through grief and literature and the distant, sanitized imagery of a culture that prefers its death in neat narrative packages — a final breath, a closing of eyes, a resolved relationship, a whispered “I love you” before the credits roll.
What Sharon witnessed in hospice care bore almost no resemblance to those cinematic exits. People died loudly and quietly, in terror and in peace, with regret and with remarkable equanimity. They died mid-sentence and mid-argument. They died holding hands of people they hadn’t spoken to in years, or alone in rooms where the television was still running and no one came in time. They died in ways that were inconvenient, undignified, sometimes almost farcical — and in those ways, they were entirely, irreducibly human.
One of Sharon’s patients — a retired schoolteacher named Evelyn — spent the final weeks of her life convinced she needed to finish grading a set of essays that had not existed for more than fifteen years. Every morning, she asked for the red pen she kept in her desk drawer. Every morning, someone found it for her, and she would hold it with the particular authority of a woman who has corrected the grammar of thousands of adolescents and found no reason to stop now. She was not confused in the way we usually mean by that word. She was, in her own interior landscape, still doing the work. Still showing up. Still insisting that sentences be structured correctly and that ideas be supported by evidence.
Evelyn’s red pen is not simply a symptom of cognitive decline. It is also a portrait of a life so fully inhabited that even the disorientation of dying could not entirely dislodge it. She was, until the end, a teacher. That identity did not dissolve in the face of death. It persisted, in the language available to her, in the gestures that had organized her days for decades.
Sharon’s education began in a ward where the average age at admission was seventy-four and the average length of stay was twelve days. Twelve days. She learned quickly that what happened in those twelve days was not a preparation for death but a compression of life — an acceleration of the emotional and relational business that, under normal circumstances, we spread over years and decades. In twelve days, families sometimes resolved things they had avoided for a lifetime. In twelve days, some people managed to say things they had never found words for in fifty years of trying.
And some didn’t. Some ran out of time before they could manage it, and the people left behind had to carry the weight of what was never said. Sharon has described this as one of the specific sorrows of hospice work — not the dying itself, but the proximity to all the things that almost happened, that very nearly got said, that were moving slowly toward articulation when the breath gave out.
V. The Pressure to Die Well
The pressure to die well, to manage one’s dying in a way that does not inconvenience or disturb the people one is leaving behind, is enormous and largely invisible. Sharon has watched it operate in almost every room she has sat in. The patient who asks “am I being too much?” The patient who apologizes for crying. The patient who, still in pain, tells the family that everything is fine because they can see how desperately the family needs to hear it.
There is a violence in that accommodation. A kindness that costs too much. Few patients she sat with were given, or gave themselves, permission to decline that role entirely — to refuse the graceful exit the room seemed to require of them. And in the rare cases when they did, Sharon noticed something shift: it left more space for everyone around them to be real, too.
VI. The Women Who Knew
Among Sharon’s stories, the ones that tend to stay longest are the ones involving women who, in some fundamental sense, already knew what was happening before anyone told them. Not in a mystical way — though Sharon is not quick to dismiss what she has seen at bedsides that defies easy explanation — but in the way that people who have spent a lifetime paying close attention to their own bodies sometimes develop a form of somatic knowledge that outpaces the medical record.
There was Miriam, eighty-one years old, a former seamstress from Budapest who had come to this country as a young woman and spent sixty years making things with her hands. She was admitted to hospice with a diagnosis of congestive heart failure, but Sharon describes her as having already made her own diagnosis some months before any physician confirmed it. She had begun, quietly and without announcement, putting her affairs in order — not in a dramatic way, not writing farewell letters or distributing heirlooms with ceremony, but in the small, practical way of a woman who had always been organized and saw no reason to stop now.
She had sorted her thread collection. Organized her patterns by season. Made sure that the recipe for her chicken paprikash — the one that had never quite made it onto paper because it lived in her hands and instincts rather than in measurements — was finally written down, with annotations, for her granddaughter.
When Sharon first met her, Miriam was sitting up in the hospital bed they had moved into her living room, sorting through a box of buttons — the kind of magnificent, archival collection that only a seamstress of sixty years could accumulate. There were buttons from coats that no longer existed, from dresses that had been remade twice and finally retired, from a child’s jacket she had sewn for a son who was now himself a grandfather. She knew what each one was for. She held each one with the particular tenderness of someone who understands that objects are not merely objects — they are concentrations of time, of attention, of love pressed into material form.
Sharon sat with her for a long time that first afternoon, and Miriam talked about buttons. She talked about what you could tell about a garment from the quality of its buttons. She talked about a coat she had repaired three times for a neighbor who could not afford a new one, and how the buttons had outlasted everything else about it. She talked about buttons with the authority of someone who has paid close attention to something for long enough to understand it from the inside.
What Sharon understood, sitting there, was that Miriam was not talking about buttons. Or rather, she was talking about buttons and everything else — about the accumulation of a life, the weight of all those small acts of making and repairing and attending to, the specific texture of sixty years spent doing something with both care and skill.
This is one of the things that dying people do, and one of the things that those who sit with them must learn to hear: the oblique approach to the unbearable. The seamstress speaks of buttons. The farmer speaks of weather patterns. And in each case, if you are paying attention, you hear the actual conversation running beneath the surface one. You hear the question that cannot quite be asked directly: Did my life mean something? Did I do it right? Was I here, really here, in the way that counts?
VII. On the Subject of Humor
Humor shows up in hospice rooms more often than people expect. Sharon will tell you, without hesitation, that some of the funniest moments of her professional life occurred there. Not the gallows humor of exhausted nurses — though that existed too and served its necessary function — but the genuine, generous humor of people who had arrived at a place where pretension was no longer affordable and the absurdity of the human condition was suddenly very visible.
There was a man named Tommy, sixty-three years old, a plumber by trade, who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer six months before his admission to hospice. By the time he arrived in Sharon’s care, the argument had reached some kind of resolution — not acceptance exactly, but something more like a negotiated truce. Tommy had decided that if he was going to die, he was going to die as himself. And himself was, inarguably, funny.
He kept a running commentary on the various indignities of the dying process that would have been mortifying if delivered with self-pity but was, as Tommy delivered it, simply and genuinely hilarious. He observed, for instance, that he had spent forty years crawling under people’s houses to fix their pipes and had managed to maintain his dignity throughout, and it was frankly insulting that the medical profession expected him to surrender that dignity now simply because his own internal plumbing had staged a coup.
He referred to his medications by the names he invented for them: the “fog pill,” the “weepy pill,” the “don’t-you-dare-eat-that pill.” He narrated the experience of his own decline with the same deadpan precision he might have applied to a particularly complicated boiler installation — noting the symptoms, describing the progression, observing the ironies with the detached curiosity of a man who had spent a lifetime diagnosing things that weren’t working correctly.
Sharon says that Tommy’s humor was not distance. This is an important distinction. There is a kind of humor that functions as armor — that keeps reality at arm’s length, refuses genuine contact with what is actually happening. Tommy’s humor was not that. He cried. He told his wife things he had kept from her for years. He had conversations with his adult children that were among the most honest of their lives. And then he made a joke about the hospital’s parking rates that made everyone in the room laugh through their tears.
The humor was not a refusal of feeling. It was a refusal to be entirely subsumed by feeling. A way of saying: I am still here. I am still paying attention. The world is still worth noticing, even this specific part of it that I would very much prefer not to be in.
Not every dying person can do this, and there is no moral hierarchy here. The lightness, when it appears — the Tommy-ness, the specific refusal to be entirely solemn about one’s own extinction — is worth celebrating not because it is easier to witness than darkness, but because it demonstrates something remarkable about human resilience. The capacity to find something worth laughing about in the most catastrophic of circumstances is not a sign of insufficient seriousness. It is one of the more extraordinary things the human mind is capable of.
VIII. What Children Understand
Among all of Sharon’s stories, the ones involving children are the most difficult to write about and the most important to include. Children occupy a particular position in relation to death — one that is, in some ways, more honest than the one most adults inhabit.
Adults have had years to construct the elaborate architecture of avoidance that keeps death at a manageable distance. We have developed language for not talking about it, social conventions for redirecting conversations away from it, a whole taxonomy of euphemism that allows us to acknowledge death’s existence without looking at it directly. Children have not yet built all of that scaffolding. They ask the questions we have trained ourselves not to ask.
Sharon tells of a seven-year-old girl named Mia whose grandfather was in hospice care in the final weeks of his life. The family had tried, with the best of intentions, to manage Mia’s access to the reality of the situation — to shield her from the most difficult aspects, to prepare her for the eventual news without giving her more than they thought she could handle.
Mia, who was seven and therefore considerably more capable of handling things than adults generally credit, saw through this entirely. On one of her visits, while the adults were doing the elaborate performance of normalcy that adults do in these situations, Mia climbed up onto the bed beside her grandfather, looked at him with the direct and undeflected gaze that children deploy before they learn to soften it, and said:
“Are you going to die soon, Grandpa?”
The room went very still. And the grandfather — a man named Frank, who had been managing his own death with a careful emotional economy that Sharon recognized as the effort of a man trying not to burden his family — looked at his granddaughter for a long moment and then said:
“Yes, sweetheart. I think so.”
And Mia considered this for a moment and said:
“Will you remember me after?”
The question broke something open in that room. It was not a question that any of the adults had found a way to ask — not in that direct form, not without the extensive buffering of adult propriety. And Frank, who had been carefully managing his emotional presentation for weeks, was undone by it. He cried. He held his granddaughter and told her that he would remember her always, that she would be with him wherever he was going, that the particular way she laughed and the drawings she made and the specific weight of her against his side were things he would carry into whatever came next.
Whether this is literally true — whether consciousness persists in a form capable of memory and love — is one of the central questions of this book, and I will not attempt to resolve it here. But what was true in that moment was the love. What was true was that a seven-year-old girl had asked the question that needed asking, and that in asking it had given an old man permission to be present with his own dying in a way that the adult management of the situation had, despite its best intentions, been preventing.
Children understand that death is real in a way that many adults have managed to forget. They have not yet learned the social convention of behaving as though death is always happening to someone else, somewhere else, at some indeterminate future time. Mia knew that her grandfather was dying right now, in this room, in this specific and irreversible way, and she sat with him in it without flinching.
That is, in its own way, the bravest thing in this chapter.
IX. The Language of the Body
One of the things Sharon learned early in her hospice work is that the dying body has its own language. It does things, in the weeks and days before death, that speak with a kind of eloquence that is entirely non-verbal and entirely unmistakable, once you know how to read it.
The hands often begin their own conversation. They reach for things that aren’t there — a phenomenon that hospice workers observe so frequently it has a clinical term, though Sharon prefers not to reduce it to the clinical when the experiential dimension is so much more interesting. People in the final days of life will sometimes reach upward, toward something or someone that only they can perceive, with an expression that is difficult to describe as anything other than recognition. As though they see something they were not expecting to see, or someone they had been waiting for.
Sharon is not a supernaturalist. She does not reach quickly for mystical explanations. But she is also not a reductionist, and she has sat with too many people at too many deathbeds to dismiss these moments as merely neurological. Or rather: even if they are neurological — even if the reaching hands and the expressions of recognition are the product of a dying brain cycling through its stored images — the question of what those images are, and why the brain reaches for them in its final hours, seems worth sitting with.
This connects to the central metaphor of An Electrician’s Guide to the Universe. Consciousness is not a fixed object but a current — something that moves through systems, that transforms, that cannot be switched off without becoming something else. The dying brain is not simply shutting down. It is converting. The signal is changing form.
What form it takes — whether there is anything it is like to be the signal as it changes — is the question that honest philosophy cannot answer. But the question is not therefore meaningless. And the bodies of the dying, with their reaching hands and their unreadable expressions and their apparent perception of things the living cannot see, are asking it with a specificity and urgency that no abstract philosophical discourse can quite match.
X. What Nurses Know That Doctors Don’t
Sharon will say this carefully, because she holds enormous respect for the physicians she has worked alongside — and because the point is not competitive. But there is something nurses know about dying that doctors, by virtue of the structure of their work, often don’t.
Doctors encounter death in concentrated bursts: the diagnosis, the treatment decisions, the moments of crisis, the final conversation when curative options are exhausted. What they do not typically experience is the extended, intimate, hour-by-hour reality of dying. They are not there for the long afternoon when nothing is happening except the slow continuation of the process. They are absent from the 3 a.m. moment when fear arrives in full force and there is nothing to do except remain present with it.
Nurses are there for that. Particularly hospice nurses. And what that proximity teaches is something no clinical training can quite convey: the texture of dying — its own rhythm, its own logic, its own sequence that the experienced hospice nurse learns to read the way a sailor reads weather.
Sharon developed, over her years, a vocabulary for this reading that was both precise and reluctant to be reduced to clinical language. She called it “the turning” — the moment, usually subtle, when the patient’s orientation shifts from toward life to toward death. Not in the sense of giving up, exactly, but in the sense of a change in the direction of attention. Like a plant that has been growing toward one light source and now turns, slowly, toward another.
This is not, in Sharon’s telling, a morbid moment. It is often a moment of unusual peace — as though the struggle to remain oriented toward life, which can be exhausting, has been set down, and what remains is simply the experience of being in this body, in this room, in this moment.
She describes a woman named Clara, eighty-seven years old, who had been resisting her own dying for weeks — not dramatically, but with a steady, determined energy Sharon respected even as she recognized what it was costing. Clara had things to accomplish. Her granddaughter was getting married in three months, and she had applied her considerable organizational will to surviving long enough to see it.
The turning, when it came, was gentle. Sharon was sitting with her on a Thursday afternoon when Clara — who had been talking about the wedding flowers, the particular shade of blue she had chosen — went quiet in a different way from her usual quiet. Then she said, very simply:
“I don’t think I’m going to make it to the wedding.”
It was the first time she had said this — not in the sense that no one had told her, but in the sense of saying it from the inside, from her own recognition, from the place in her that knew.
Sharon said:
“No. I don’t think you are.”
Clara nodded, as though this had been confirmed rather than delivered. “She’ll be a beautiful bride,” she said. And then: “Make sure they tell her I said so.”
The turning does not always look like this. Sometimes it is readable only in retrospect. But it always involves a quality of release — the setting down of whatever the patient has been holding in the direction of the future, and a corresponding increase in presence in the immediate moment. As though releasing the future makes the present more available.
XI. The Many Ways a Person Lets Go
My wife Sharon spent the latter part of her working life at the bedsides of the dying. She has done something most of us spend our entire lives arranging not to do: she has sat in the room, again and again, at the precise moment the current finds ground. She has held hands that were still warm and then were not. She has learned, in a way no philosophy can teach, that there is no single way to die — just as there is no single way to live.
In Whose Death Is It Anyway: A Hospice Nurse Remembers, Sharon gathers twenty-five of these passages. They are not case studies. They are portraits — each one a different frequency at which a human being broadcast their final transmission.
The Ones Who Rage
There is a poem everyone quotes at deathbeds, and it is almost always quoted wrong. Dylan Thomas did not write
“Do not go gentle into that good night”
as universal wisdom. He wrote it as a son’s desperate, failing plea to a dying father. It is a poem about the living’s need for the dying to perform vitality. Sharon has watched families unconsciously make this demand — has watched dying people absorb it and do their best to comply, spending energy they did not have on performing a defiance that was not theirs. The most honest thing she has witnessed is not always the rage. Sometimes it is the patient, quiet, exhausted, who finally says: I don’t have to do this for you. And means the performance, not the dying.
The Ones Who Surrender
We have a vocabulary problem around death. We say a person “lost their battle,” as though dying were a failure of effort. Sharon has sat with patients who did not experience their dying as defeat — who laid down the weight willingly, with something that looked, from the outside, like relief. Among them was a woman named Bea, ninety-four years old, who had arrived at a clear-eyed reckoning: her circuit was complete. She understood this with the precision of a master electrician.
“There’s no fun in living anymore,”
she told Sharon and asked that her life-sustaining medications be ceased. She was not depressed. She was not confused. She was exercising the last and most fundamental form of agency available to her.
For these patients, surrender was not capitulation. It was a final act of authorship: the choice to stop performing the fight that the living demanded of them, and to write their own ending instead.
The Ones Who Wait
Every hospice nurse has stories of the strange sovereignty the dying exercise over the moment of death. They wait for the estranged son to land. They die in the ninety seconds the spouse stepped out for coffee, as though they needed privacy for the final act. Sharon has watched people hold on past all medical expectation for a date — a birthday, an anniversary, a grandchild’s birth — and then let go within hours of it passing, as though the future had been the last thing tethering them here, and releasing it released everything.
David was one of these. A man with pancreatic cancer, he spent his final days asking insistently for his shoes, saying he needed to “go upstairs” or “go home” — despite living in a single-story house. He was not confused in any ordinary sense. He was, Sharon believes, translating. The current was preparing to jump the gap, and he was asking, in the only language available to him, for whatever would allow him to make the leap cleanly. His family, bewildered and heartbroken, eventually stopped trying to correct him. They sat with him instead. They let him wait. And in his own time, he went.
The Ones Who Make Us Laugh
We have spent some time already with Tommy, the plumber who narrated his own dissolution with deadpan precision. But Tommy was not alone in this. Sharon has sat with patients who made everyone in the room laugh while actively dying — who treated their own extinction as the universe’s final and most absurd punchline. Among them was Sally, a woman with end-stage breast cancer and a tracheostomy who filled her hospital bed with Strawberry Shortcake coloring books, plotted a Christmas party with Jack Daniels, and found a “boyfriend” in a fellow hospice patient with whom she communicated via walkie-talkie in the dead of night. Her past had been deeply painful. Her dying was, against all odds, joyful.
Then there was Priscilla, eighty-six years old, holding court in silk jacquard pajamas from the center of a messy queen-sized bed, proclaiming she would live to be a hundred and dance at her own birthday party. During what appeared to be her final comatose moments, her Persian cat jumped onto her chest and began kneading her paws — and Priscilla suddenly opened her eyes, looked at her gathered, weeping family, and asked:
“Can I have some Coke?”
The humor was not distance from what was happening. It never is, when it is real. It is the last defiant assertion of a self that intends to remain a self right up until the current stops flowing through the body.
The Ones Who Teach
Some patients lectured or summarized their lives into aphorisms for posterity. Others — the quietest and most quietly radical — taught simply by the sheer quality of their presence at the threshold, changing the people who witnessed them.
Margaret, eighty-one, a retired schoolteacher from Ohio, continued instructing right up until the morphine took her syntax. In her final days, she held Sharon’s hand and narrated what she was experiencing with the patient precision of a woman who had spent forty years making the abstract concrete for children who did not yet have the vocabulary to understand it.
“It’s warm,”
Margaret said.
“And it gets quieter. Like the way a train sounds when it’s leaving, not arriving.”
Sharon wrote it down. She writes everything down. This is her discipline and her devotion — the refusal to let these transmissions go unrecorded.
Then there was James, a sixty-three-year-old former marine who had survived two wars and a marriage he described as “considerably more dangerous than either.” In his dying — pancreatic cancer taking him in careful increments — James became something Sharon had not anticipated: tender. He called his estranged daughter and apologized with a directness and specificity unlike anything Sharon had witnessed. He did not say I’m sorry for everything. He named each thing. Individually. As though he had been keeping a ledger for decades and had finally decided to settle his accounts.
His daughter said very little. She did not need to. The ledger was not really for her, Sharon thinks. It was for James. He was teaching himself, at the last possible hour, how to put something down.
This is what the teachers do. They use the hour well.
XII. Death’s Conscious Witness
I am a philosopher and theorist of death. I have sat with many people who have been near death. I have sat with many families who have just lost a beloved partner or child. Yet I have never been a midwife for death. Sharon, on the other hand, has been its companion. The distinction matters more than it might appear.
I write about consciousness as current and the resonance between human circuits, about conversion events and unlimited bandwidth, about the song that outlives the record. I do this from my desk, in good health, with coffee going cold beside me — which is to say, from a position of profound and unearned safety. Sharon did her work in the room. When my metaphors run out, she was still there, she adjusted a pillow, moistened a lip, witnessed the thing itself with no theory between her and the dying.
There is a humility I have learned from being married to a hospice nurse.
Sharon has said to me, in various forms and not unkindly, that the dying do not need our frameworks. She does not dismiss philosophy — she is, in her way, as philosophical as anyone I have met. But she has seen what happens when a framework is imposed on a dying person by someone who loves them and cannot bear the formlessness of what is actually happening. She has watched families arrive with narratives — he’s going to a better place, she’s finally at peace — and she has watched the dying person lie quietly inside those narratives, using the last of their energy to protect the living from the truth of what dying actually feels like.
“They work so hard for us,”
Sharon told me once.
“Even at the end. Even when they have nothing left. They manage our feelings.”
The framework is for us — the survivors, the rememberers, the ones left holding the silence. The dying are doing something we cannot help them with and cannot follow them into. The most we can offer is what Sharon offers: to stay, to witness, to not look away.
What she has learned — and what her book transmits, story by story — is that presence is not passive. To sit in the room without flinching, without performing comfort you do not feel, without filling the silence with noise simply because the silence is unbearable: this is skilled work. This is, she would resist the word but I will use it anyway, a form of love that requires training.
And perhaps that is the deepest connection between her book and mine. Whose Death Is It Anyway and An Electrician’s Guide to the Universe are asking the same question from opposite ends of the wire. She asks it from the bedside; I ask it from the blueprint. She knows what the current feels like as it leaves. I have my limited experiences and whatever theories I have developed about where it goes.
Between us we approach something whole.
The Idiot’s Final Lesson
If that is what an idiot looks like, we should all aspire to such idiocy.
I wrote that earlier, and I meant it. But I understand it better now, having set André beside the twenty-five souls in Sharon’s care. André was not exceptional in his dying. That is the point. Every one of these people — the ragers and the surrenderers, the waiters and the jokers and the teachers, Margaret with her train metaphor and James with his carefully itemized ledger, Bea pulling her own plug with quiet authority, Priscilla asking for a Coke on what should have been her final breath — was, in their final hours, exactly and irreducibly themselves.
The diagnosis did not make them. It revealed them.
This is what Sharon has tried to tell me in a hundred different ways over the years, and what I have only now, writing this, begun to fully receive. The end does not transform a person into someone else. It distills them. It burns away the performance and the self-protection and the carefully maintained social surfaces, and what remains is whatever was always most essentially there. The current, on its way to ground, illuminates the filament one last time, and you see clearly what each of them had always been.
André had always been someone who refused to be diminished by what was happening to him. Not through denial — he was under no illusions about his prognosis — but through a stubborn insistence on remaining a subject rather than becoming an object. A person, not a case. A self, not a body failing its systems. The comedy was not defense. It was declaration: I am still here. I am still, specifically, me. You will not have my solemnity, because it was never mine to give.
Death is the most universal experience available to us, and the most singular. We will all die. No two of us will die alike. This is the paradox Sharon witnesses daily and I theorize at length, and it is, I think, the truest thing either of us has to say about the matter.
The lights go out. The song stops playing here. The bandwidth, having carried its particular and irreplaceable signal, falls quiet in this room, on this frequency, through this beloved and infuriating man.
But energy is never destroyed. The electrician knows this. The hospice nurse knows this in her hands. And somewhere — in another room, on another channel, in a form we have no instrument to measure — the current finds its ground, and is converted, and goes on.
Bring the coffee and savor every sip, while you can still taste it.
