Spitting in death’s eye

As a philosopher I have read reason’s response to death, and my mind is convinced by the Epicurean rationale that says death is nothing before it happens and we are nothing while it happens. It’s too bad that philosophers are also made of carne y hueso (flesh and bone), as Miguel de Unamuno liked to point out, because it’s not my mind but my intestines that kink up when I imagine watching my father die. He’s 85 and healthy, but the elderly are susceptible to small infections that younger folk easily fight off. Epicurus’s brain is no match for my eyes, which will likely watch one or both of my parents give up the ghost, and soon.

I’ve seen two human dead