The Mississippi house I grew up in is as old as my late grandmother, spending seventy-four years perched on one acre below the highway. She always bragged that her pop, after having been a share cropper, had built it with his own hands, and the average-height door frames and tarring pine floors always seconded that statement. I didn’t quite understand the satisfaction that coated her words, or why she left the hospital to die in her bed, tightly bound by the pangs of her last breaths.
Most wouldn’t think it clever for a Stage IV cancer patient to rescind the moderate relief treatments offered just to have the privilege of dying in one’s own house, just as they wouldn’t consider it wise to try to ride out a storm for the same reason—especially if there was even a sliver of hope for more life. I reckon Ms. Wisdom and my grandmother figured dying at home, in a space created especially for them in the midst of communities that hadn’t always allowed those spaces (no matter how small), was better than having that home and the resistance wedged between its very floorboards taken away. And in August 2005, five hundred twenty Louisianians over the age of seventy-one felt the exact same way.
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