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I know what happens to me after I die, but what about those left behind? « The Story's Story

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I keep thinking about what happens to my wife, Bess, after I die; there’s a recurrent image in my mind, about what happens to her after I’m gone, that I can’t seem to shake. Bess once started a story this way: I know what happens after you die. I take your family into a quiet room, with Kleenex, and then I say the word “dead.” Not “expired” (because you are a person, not milk), and not “passed on,” because families always want to believe that just means I transferred you to another hospital. Dead. I have to say it. That’s basically all they taught us about how to deliver bad news in medical school. A one-hour lecture. When you train to become a doctor, they don’t really teach you about death. They tell you how to prevent it, how to fight it, how to say it—but not how to face it. She’s an ER doctor, so she’s delivered a lot of bad news to a lot of families—her line of work delivers bad news like OB-GYNs deliver babies. She tells families about death, and sometimes coroners, but she does

August 21, 2023 By Jake Seliger in Personal Tags: cancer , personal 14 Comments I keep thinking about what happens to my wife, Bess, after I die ; there’s a recurrent image in my mind, about what happens to her after I’m gone, that I can’t seem to shake. Bess once started a story this way: I know what happens after you die. I take your family into a quiet room, with Kleenex, and then I say the word “dead.” Not “expired” (because you are a person, not milk), and not “passed on,” because families always want to believe that just means I trans

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