By Katie Hafner in the NYT.
Ed note: Katie was looking for a dying patient to talk to about voting. I was able to connect her with a woman in Oregon who happened to be following this blog! I managed to also connect Katie with Dr. Barry Baines who wrote about ethical wills, and with my psychiatrist friend Dr. Kent Neff. Katie has managed to capture what is means to not only stay alive but to be alive with a purpose–to vote!
Annamarie Eggert has voted in every presidential election since 1948, when she cast her ballot for Harry S. Truman. Now she is 94 and ailing, but she is determined to vote in this one, too.
Mrs. Eggert, a Biden supporter in York, Maine, has expressive aphasia, a condition that has made it difficult for her to talk. “We — need — to get Trump out of there,” she said, each word painstakingly coaxed from her lips. “Come hell — or high water, I will — vote.”
In this most contentious of elections, in which the very act of voting has come under fierce national debate, the determination of many very old, ill and infirm Americans to cast what could be their last vote is profound.
Though aware that they might not live long enough to be affected by the results, they say they are voting for children, grandchildren and their future — a final heartfelt, empowering act as American citizens.
“Most of my life at this point really is vicarious,” said Jill Haak Adels, 82, who has an aggressive form of cancer and a progressive lung condition that makes her increasingly short of breath. Yet she is making sure she will be able to vote, and intends to cast a straight Republican ballot.
“The president we have now is just fine,” she said. “He’s done a lot of things that have been overdue for a long time.”
She does not have a car to get to her polling place in Beverly, Mass., near the assisted living facility where she lives. So she has placed several calls to the town hall to remind the clerk to send her a mail-in ballot.