From the New England Journal of Medicine by Scott Halpern, M.D., Ph.D
Grandpa married my biologic grandmother when I was 4 years old, after the deaths of their first spouses. A quarter-century later, at the age of 85, he officiated at my wedding after undergoing a nonsectarian ordainment in California. He became the grandfather my wife had never had, and he taught me how to love her. Fittingly, our second daughter was born on his birthday, a mere 93 years behind him.
Two years after my grandmother died, Grandpa, then 95, moved in with a lovely 86-year-old woman he’d met at local political gatherings. They enjoyed 4 splendid years together before she died from cancer while receiving hospice care in their apartment. Having effectively become a widower for the third time in his life, Grandpa wrote in a memoir for his family, “My life was over too, only existence remained.”
It was downhill from there. An attack of vertigo landed him in an acute rehabilitation facility. Then sudden-onset, unilateral blindness compounded the communication challenges he’d long faced due to deafness resulting from active duty in World War II. I asked him to move in with us, but he’d have none of it. “You need to focus on your family, not on this old man,” he told us more than once, despite our insistence that he played a central role in our family.
Instead, he moved into an assisted living facility in northern New Jersey. The location enabled a steady stream of visits from his children, a daughter of his recently lost partner, and my family. When none of us were with him, he kept in touch by email, and he passed the time satisfyingly enough by reading voraciously, as he had his whole life.
As his arthritis worsened, composing email messages of more than a few words became onerous for him. “It’s frustrating when the fingers can’t keep up with the brain,” he’d lament. And then visitation restrictions necessitated by Covid-19 cut him off from the outside world entirely, since his deafness had long since made phones useless to him. When the Northeast surge abated, Grandpa’s son and I received permission to visit him outside his facility on separate days. Lucid as ever, despite nearing his 103rd birthday, he rendered the same plea to each of us. Whereas he had long wished to forgo measures to prolong life, he now sought any plausible option to hasten death.