#medical-decision-making

#medical-decision-making

At 37, I thought I was a long way from the surgeon's knife. And yet... when I look in the mirror and smile, I notice wrinkles around my eyes and creases stretching from my nose and around the corners of my mouth. I figured that, if anything, the talks with cosmetic surgeons would give me the information I'd need when things started to sag and droop in, say, five or ten years.

On a sunny and warmish late-November day, my husband and I were meeting some close relatives to deposit our brother-in-law's ashes in a columbarium beside the remains of his late wife, my husband's only sibling. She had died during the pandemic, and her husband had subsequently moved away, but none of us were going to let the grim reaper separate a couple who had been conjoined by a lifetime of shared experiences.