August 10, 2026August 10, 2026

On Getting Through the Worst Day

JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU’VE HIT BOTTOM, HANDS REACH DOWN TO PULL YOU UP

My beloved friend Bob left the planet recently.

It was time. He was done with all this. We have a good law, the California End of Life Option Act, that offers the choice of Medical Aid in Dying if one is a mentally competent, terminally ill adult. So after many years of battling cancer — most of them wonderfully good and productive years — he didn’t so much surrender as choose to leave the battlefield. We should all have the grace, and the good fortune, to make such a choice.

Still.

A few days earlier he’d called to say goodbye. I declined; we settled on See you around. Then on that morning after I awoke to an email of two hearts in my inbox from him; another two, later, from his wife. (Though he and I had loved each other deeply for years, she understood. I’m pretty sure I was not even close to being his only extra-marital beloved.)

I had gone to bed that night before, after sending off my own hearts, with a heavy one of my own. The hearts in the inbox helped, but the heaviness was slow to lift; loss takes its own time to wear itself down. As Anna Quindlen concludes in her poem “Old Friends” — which also references earthquakes and tsunamis and terrorist attacks — “Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.” So I poured a cup of coffee, thought sorrowfully and fondly of his family, and wondered how any of us would get through the day.

And then these things happened:

A new photo of my one-month-old great-granddaughter popped up in a family text stream. Her father, my grandson, is shampooing her hair.

A neighbor of Bob’s — who knew him only casually but knew of our friendship and his illness — sent an email saying she and her husband were walking by his house this morning and thinking of how often they enjoyed the lovely music coming from his piano. She hoped things were okay and just wanted to send a note.

My daughter-in-law called to fill me in on family lives, and discuss some technological issues she has offered to help me with. If dealing with technology won’t take your mind off your sorrows (and/or replace them all with rage and frustration) nothing will.

A neighbor in my building sent a text saying how much he was enjoying the new flower arrangement outside my door. As it happened, the flowers in my building’s lobby were to be replaced in the morning,

New arrangement of aging flowers (Author photo)

so it was legal to snatch a few (the white ones, dahlias perhaps?) late last night. I poked them into a vase with some hydrangeas brought by dinner guests two weeks ago. Who needs new flowers, when aging ones bring community joy?

A political activist friend emailed an invitation to a fundraiser for some national candidates I greatly admire. She knew I couldn’t afford the big bucks initially advertised, but a few cut-rate tickets had quietly been made available. (Or so she said.) Maybe these folks aren’t as big a draw as we’d hope? — at least it meant getting to meet and greet a few heroes, and in lively, fancy company!

Some old Substacks and Medium posts generated thoughtful comments, some of them funny, all bringing just a tiny fragment of someone else’s soul.

At lunch I visited with a group of old friends; we talked causes and politics and trivia. After dinner, another old friend came for a visit and to use my shower, because she has no hot water. Life in senior living facilities does not always run smoothly. But her trouble was my gain.

In my reading pile are several unfinished New Yorker’s and Atlantics, Ann Patchett’s new Whistler and (audiobook version) The Odyssey. Miss Mabel K. Whiteside, who taught me Greek 101 an antiquity ago, would be proud.

Just another day on planet earth. Minus the physical presence but not the living spirit of one treasured soul, and still peopled with others —

Each one reaching down a hand of friendship.

End-of-Life/General interest

February 2, 2023February 4, 2023

Losing – But Not Mourning For – My Sister

by Fran Johns

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Several weeks ago I lost the last of my three older sisters. Condolences are still coming in almost every day via calls and notes and emails. In response I’ve often explained that while I’m feeling extraordinarily sorry for myself — much of my lifelong identity has been as the youngest of four: The Moreland Girls — I do not grieve for my sister Helen.

Helen, I am quick to say, was greatly beloved. By her four children and twelve grandchildren, by a host of friends and other relatives, and very particularly by me. I was her Franciscavichy; she was my Helenchen. Though we’ve been geographically separated for most of our adult lives by thousands of miles, we wrote (yes, old-fashioned notes and letters) and emailed often, and spoke on the phone at least every few weeks. A visit to her western New York retirement community home during the pandemic break of 2021 and again in the fall of 2022 were highlights of those years.

I just don’t mourn for Helen.

The Moreland Girls circa 1940s, bookended by Helen and me (Author photo)

Some years ago, not long after the death of her husband, Helen began to talk about how she didn’t want to “linger.” Her husband had lingered.

When he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in his late 60s they called to say they were going out to celebrate. He had suspected dementia, she’d thought he might have a brain tumor, and they both believed Parkinson’s a far better affliction.

His physician had said my brother-in-law could expect to have “10 good years,” and they said with one voice, “We’ll take it!”

What nobody talked with them about was how many bad years he would have, and how bad they would get. My brilliant, witty, gregarious brother-in-law had spent his life in academia but spent his last years in hell, slowly losing his mobility, his speech and eventually all physical or cognitive function.

I knew exactly what Helen meant when she spoke of not wanting to linger.

More recently she took to saying things like, “This isn’t living.” Life, for her as well as for the two of them during their long and eventful marriage, meant going to dinners and lectures and events with other bright minds, singing in the Boston community chorus they founded, attending concerts and operas and plays.

I often quipped with Helen that she might consider taking up prayer — she was a determined atheist — so she could pray when she went to bed that she wouldn’t wake up. Instead, she simply wished it.

Photo by Sunguk Kim on Unsplash

Once, after feeling bad all day, she was so certain of this likely happenstance that she left a long message on my answering machine about what a wonderful little sister I’d always been; she wanted to let me know that in case she didn’t wake up. (A lovely message to have now forever.)

Over decades of working as a volunteer with hospice, an AIDS support group in the 1990s and currently End of Life Choices CA, I’ve seen some tragically bad deaths, and more than a few you’d call Good Deaths: peacefully in one’s own bed, surrounded by loved ones.

Helen finally got the good death she wished for. Her physician daughter came over to rub her back when she went to bed, after a day of feeling generally low. The next day she didn’t wake up.

Helen was 95. We should all sign up for this: resting in peace like my Helenchen.

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FOR SOME EXCELLENT HELP WITH MAKING YOUR OWN END-OF-LIFE WISHES KNOWN, SEE THE RESOURCES TAB AT WWW.END0FLIFECHOICESCA.ORG (EVEN IF YOU DON’T LIVE IN CA!)

California/Health/Lifestyle/Medicine/seniors/Sports/USA/Women

May 24, 2010

Grief: A mind/body conundrum

by Fran Johns

Physician treating a patient. Red-figure Attic... — Image via Wikipedia

This is a cautionary tale.

The main character, a woman of a certain age, became concerned about suddenly being short of breath. Nine months earlier she had defended her title in a 5k community road race, so it didn’t seem to make sense that she would be huffing and puffing after one block on a slight incline. She worried more and more, and finally went to see her primary care physician.

“No,” said the doctor, “this should not be. We’ll start with a stress test to check out the heart, and then go with a pulmonary function test. Recent x-rays haven’t shown anything wrong with your lungs, but we’ll want to make sure.”

The patient aced the stress test, which relieved everyone. Subsequently, at the end of the pulmonary function tests she did the six-minute walk, as instructed, regular pace, and the nurse who had been following along in case she conked out said, “Well, you’ve got no shortness of breath, and I’m exhausted.”

In between, an interesting thing had happened. During a visit with her niece, who is a family practice physician in another state, the medical dilemma happened to come up. “Well,” said the niece, rather gently, “you’re doing all the right things: seeing your doctor, having a stress test first, checking pulmonary function. But when all is said and done you did just lose a sister to respiratory failure, while you were still grieving the loss of another sister almost within the same year… It could be that your body is just trying to tell you something.”

Almost immediately I felt better. Went ahead with the pulmonary function test just to err on the side of caution, but by then I was feeling so much better that just walking around that hospital corridor at what felt a leisurely pace was still enough to wear out a nurse who is 10 years younger. She hadn’t told me she was required to follow. And of course, at the start of it all, I hadn’t thought to mention anything about sibling loss to my primary care doctor. Communication is good.

Soon afterwards, I attended a meeting at which the keynote speaker was Lyn Prashant, founder of an organization called Degriefing. Among the handouts was a page headed “Common Grief Reactions,” featuring lists of physical, emotional and mental responses to grief. Number 5 under Physical? You guessed it: shortness of breath.

Who knew? Certainly not this writer, who has only spent the past three decades intensely involved with end-of-life issues. Hospice volunteer, part of an AIDS support group throughout the 1990s, currently a chapter board member and client volunteer for Compassion and Choices, author of dozens of articles and one book about end-of-life issues. Never heard of any of those physical manifestations of grief — or if I had, they were too abstract to register.

That was then, this is now: Loss, sorrow, grief — is it all in your head? Maybe not.