Yesterday I wrote an obituary.

It was for my Uncle Larry, who died on Thursday, a few weeks short of his 88th birthday.

He’d been sick for a long time, and his death wasn’t a surprise. I spent much of the day with him, as he was dying, with my Aunt Tanya.

Being with a person who is dying is a very specific experience. This is not the first time I’ve done it. The labored breathing, referred to by most people as a death rattle, and by medical workers as Cheyne-Stokes respiration is one of those sounds you recognize when you hear it, viscerally, in your animal brain, like the sound of a big earthquake.

A friend in California told me once you can hear an earthquake coming. I couldn’t imagine what the sound would be like, until I heard it, in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.  I knew exactly what it was, in my body, the sound like a train boring through the earth at impossible speed from my right, just before everything started pitching like a ship in a storm. The death rattle is like that, you know it when you hear it, it echoes through our collective memory.

I write and think and talk about how we work, how we can work better. I work. But being that close to death is a bracing reminder of the realities we hide from. Life ends. No one, on their deathbed, wishes they spent more time at the office.

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