Three years ago, my father and I rode horses together for miles and miles of trails at a Florida state park. Two weeks after that, the world shut down and two years later, he died. His dying was my first very close-up experience with serious illness and death.
If we’re lucky, we learn something from our parents about how to face the end of life. Maybe they talk to us about how they want to spend their last days, what they most fear, how they feel about us, and what they believe about an afterlife. But for my dad and me, it didn’t go down like that.