This Is the End, My Friends

[A note from Steve’s wife Nancy: After several weeks in the hospital and a nursing facility, Steve was in home Hospice for three weeks and finally passed about 1:30 p.m. on Friday, February 16, 2024. This is the post he wrote a couple of weeks before he passed.]

Some of you may know I’m in the process of dying. This is weird for me to contemplate as this end is not what I ever envisioned. My desire has always been to live as long as I have a decent quality of life. Now, that condition is no longer met. I have some mysterious disease that even Mayo Clinic can’t figure out. But there’s no denying the symptoms that at this point include a complete loss of use of my legs and increasing weakness in my arms and numbness in my hands, which worsens almost daily.

But lucky me! I also have end-stage renal disease that has had me on dialysis since about five months ago. So ultimately, I have control over my living and dying by continuing or stopping dialysis. If I choose to stop dialysis then the doctors tell me I will pass in about 1 to 4 weeks. And everybody claims it will be a peaceful process of sleeping longer and longer until one day I don’t wake up. I made that choice—on Wednesday, January 24th, I had my last dialysis treatment. On Friday, January 26th I entered home Hospice.

For better or worse, the one organ that seems to be working really well for me is my brain. I have full cognitive ability, which leaves me wondering, how is one supposed to die? What should I be thinking about? What should I be doing? What should I not be doing? I talked to a doctor/philosopher friend of mine, and told him I have a concern that I might not be dying the right way. After he was done heartily laughing at me for such a nonsensical thought, he pointed out quite succinctly that my way is the right way, whatever that way is. So, for example, he gave me permission to continue to be a news junkie following the presidential race even though I won’t be around to vote.

Part of the process that I’ve felt all along is for the better is that I’ve made no bones about my situation and have had the gift of lots of friends and family reaching out to me and having actually rather nice conversations. It’s rewarding to feel the caring, but it’s also comforting to just reminisce about days gone by.

But I am also sensing a gap: I’ve never been a spiritual or religious person and really don’t expect to change that now, but at the same time, I have what I suppose are spiritual thoughts. Since my daughter Laura died five years ago, I have felt the strong sense of connection with her from wherever she is. That’s caused me to be a little less dogmatic about my beliefs around life and death. I now accept the possibility that a part of me will live on after death. I have a strong sense that some part of my being or my spirit or whatever you wanna call it will persist in the universe, and allow me to look out for my loved ones from wherever I’ll be.

This is hard for me to admit. As a physicist, my training has conditioned me to think about life and death in physical terms. But I’m also comforted by knowing that some of our great physicists were very spiritual people, most notably, Albert Einstein. Hey, I’m no Einstein, but I do accept the very strong possibility that some form of connection between my essence and the physical world will somehow persist. If that turns out to be the case, I’ll do my best to update this post and let you know, but don’t count on it because I’m not sure that dead people can type.

Regardless, mine has been a good life with enough ups and downs and adventures to satisfy me. I’ve had some substantial successes in my life and made some colossal blunders. If any of my blunders have negatively impacted you for any reason, I seriously regret that and I hope you will accept my apology for my sometimes being a bull in a China shop.

This website was intended to record my memoir from the beginning to the end. Unfortunately I ran out of mojo while there were still so many stories to tell. But at least I did get to tell about a bit of my life which, above all else, I wanted people to be entertained by. Thanks for listening.