Burns

There is more in a vigil around a deathbed than prayer. Tears are shed when cancer cells are scattered around a patient's abdominal cavity like pearls from a broken string. Conversations are intermingled with beeping alarm from the infusion pump for pain medication. Then there are muttered mumbles from neighboring beds.

I have been aware of how heart-wrenching it can be when I reserved a book written by a palliative care doctor Kathryn Mannix: With the End in Mind.

By the time I picked up the book about dying this week, it has become clear to me that conversation about death isn't too challenging. After all, most diseases follow a predictable pattern of trajectory towards the very end of life. But this is not the case for calamities from human clashes.

Now that Hong Kong is sick, stories of dying patients under palliative care specialists are much easier to swallow. The day after our alma mater campus turned into a smoking battlefield with teargas fired, I had experienced much more difficulty in reading news story than Kathryn's chronicle of a woman dying from widespread bowel cancer.

If I had the choice, I'd rather read Mannix's lessons on how to live and die well, instead of the news feed about how our campus burns.