I met Death yesterday.

He was nothing like you see in the movies. He did not wear a hood or carry a seive. Nor did he wear the face of an aged man gasping for air. No, yesterday he chose to meet me in a baseball cap and high tops. As if embracing the irony he laughed. I breathed it in, tried to cleanse my soul of the truth that was coming.

He was taken for a walk "so he doesn't have to listen." I watched his parents hand the doctor his living will. She read it out loud: "Do not resuscitate, do not intubate, no antibiotics . . . " And then the questions. Will he be able to start swallowing better? Will he be get out of his wheelchair? Are there any more tests? Any more medicines?

And as I stood and listened to talk about comfort care and autopsies his father looked at me, the black fly in the corner, as if to plead for some sense of doubt. I closed my eyes, trying to pretend he wasn't calling out for something, anything to save him from this nightmare. Because I didn't want my eyes to lie.

Death doesn't come to torture the dying. We have medicines to treat pain, nausea, breathlessness. Death comes to torture the living. And as I watched this man pound his fist against the wall and sob, all I could think of was the silence that would fill his 6 AM breakfast when it was no longer interupted by a child's desire to spend a few minutes with Dad.