How a Near Stranger Helped Me Cope with Death

In late 1996, when I was 35 years old, I had finally reached a point in my life where I felt I had just about everything I had ever wanted. I had grown up in extreme poverty, in rural Georgia. But I had been lucky and hardworking enough to become a professor of psychology at UCLA. In fact, I had just received tenure. I even had a pretty happy marriage. After all, I had not yet discovered that my wife was a lesbian (nor had she, by the way). I had almost completed a book on one of my favorite topics, and the book was getting great reviews. And then the impossible happened.

I got a call from my sister Rhonda, who told me that our mother had just been diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer. The brain tumor was tucked away deep in the back of her brain — the temporal lobe. That turns out to be the area that is almost exclusively devoted to vision. My mom had gone to the eye doctor because she was having great difficulty seeing. He quickly saw that her eyes were in fine shape, and he told her to get herself to a neurologist as soon as possible. The neurologist confirmed what the optometrist had feared. But the neurologist also told my family, almost all of whom still lived in Georgia, that there was a chance that surgery and chemotherapy could save my mom’s life. This was one of those lucky times when my family happened to have health insurance, and as far as I can tell, my mom got good medical care.

After the first surgery, I became mildly hopeful. The surgeon had removed a great deal of the tumor, and apparently…