He was asking me to let him die as a person who was loved, rather than a file that was closed.

And I found that I could not, in good conscience, refuse a man that.

I had learned, over a year of sitting with the dying, exactly how much that request meant, and why it was not strange at all, though it looked strange from outside.

Because I had watched, again and again, the particular indignity of a lonely death, and it had taught me something our culture works hard not to look at: that the worst part of dying alone is not the physical solitude, but the erasure.

When a person dies with no one, they do not simply die unaccompanied.