Sublime

three years before my birth. In the United States, African Americans are 25 percent more likely to die of cancer than Whites. My father survived prostate cancer, which kills twice as many Black men as it does White men. Breast cancer disproportionately kills Black women.

Dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept. In the late nineteenth century, dying at a hospital was reserved for indigents, the people who had nothing and no one. Given the choice, a person wanted to die at home in their bed, surrounded by friends and family. As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, more t

The new nurse—“the lady with the lamp,” selflessly tending the wounded—caught the popular imagination.

The mortician came in and said, “We didn’t wash your mother’s face yet, and we didn’t shut her mouth. If you give us one hundred euros we will do this for you.” Oh, my country.