did you know I am a pain and dying specialist?

No, seriously. Although I spend most of my time studying how to treat cancer, my real passion lays in those patients for whom treatment is no longer an option. They have pain both of the heart and of the mind and of the body and are what we call "actively dying." Well, many of them are. Some are not actively dying, but have untreated or untreatable pain. That's where I come in.

Right now I am in a class called "Living with Dying." I sort of feel like it's a class they would be offering at Hogwarts, especially when I look over the required reading list: Dying Well, the Prospect for Growth at the End of Life, Man's Search for Meaning, (3rd edition), Intimate Death, Handbook for Mortals, Living with Dying, a Guide to Palliative Care. Additionally we have articles with titles like "How we die: reflections on life's final chapter" and "The nature of suffering and the goals of medicine." It's all a little- no, a lot- macabre.

"what is this all about?" my mother asks me on almost a weekly basis. As a therapist, she is bound and determined to get to the source of this death thing. Like I'm abnormal for wanting to devote my working life to easing the pains and suffering of those people at the very end of their life. Like it's a pathology. I can almost hear her take off her mother cap and try to slyly slip on her therapist cap just before she asks the question. "What is this all about?"

I suppose she'd want me to tell her that I am really afraid of dying and by doing this I am coming to terms with my own mortality. Or maybe it has to do with all the untapped grief I've been storing up my entire life. It could be unresolved abandonment issues, or maybe some sort of repressed memory syndrome that she will uncover miraculously over the phone and that would open me up to a better, stronger, happier life and relationship with her. Perhaps she actually fears that I will say something about how bad parenting made me into a death-absorbed adult.

None of these are true, really. Of course I worry about dying too soon and leaving all these projects half completed. I'm pretty good at expressing grief. (much to the embarassment of most of my family, I am a cryer. big time.) I think there are other, more productive ways I could manage my abandonment issues, and I'm 100% positive there aren't any repressed memories that will sneak out at some inconvenient time. I don't know if anything would really solve the complexities that are the mother-daughter relationship. And bad parenting made me into a control freak, but I doubt that have much to do with my interest in end-of-life issues. just kidding. I'm not really a seriously bad control freak. only a little bit.

So I spend my best days with people who are spending their last days in the hospital. It's pretty amazing to watch human beings at the end of life. I'm in utter awe of families of people with terminal disease and how they manage to make the terminal illness part of their normal routine. It's breathtaking to watch a person go from hearing news about their poor prognosis to asking if they can have more pudding with dinners. I mean, wow.

I've been thinking a lot about normalizing lately. Ever since I got married last year, I have been watching how couples cope with terminal disease. I watch these elderly people caring for each other and I wonder all those things you wonder when someone else's life flashes before your eyes. Will we be lucky enough to live that long? Is it lucky to hope that we can support each other through this business of living with dying? Aren't we living with dying this very moment and what makes terminal disease so different?

I want a degree of acuity. I want clarity. I want a crystal ball.

I definitely do not want sweets to ever have to care for me while I lay dying. But at the same time, wouldn't I prefer we could have a good death that reflected our good life? One of us has to go first, right? For many of these families I see, the ultimate gift they share with each other is the absolute intimacy involved with the minutae of care while dying. At that time, if a person can forgive, if a person can be vulnerable, if a person can be honest, there is great potential for love. If there was one single thing I would want most, wouldn't it be the ability to open myself and my sweets up to deep and endless love? That would be better than any eight ball telling me "ask again later" or even more frustrating "cannot predict now." There's no clarity in that.

While my grandmother was sick and in the hospital she kept telling me how sorry she felt that I was spending my holiday with her in that hospital room. But she gave me something then that I had waited my whole life to have- she was honest with me. She told me stories about her life that she had never told anyone ever before. She allowed me to help her up to go to the bathroom and let me feed her. She said "I bet you never thought you'd see your own grandma in diapers, did you?" and I would reply "Well, you saw me in diapers, didn't you?" and we would both smile.