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55 The First Sam Hazo at the Last A minor brush with medicine in eighty years was all he’d known. But this was different. His right arm limp and slung, his right leg dead to feeling and response, he let me spoon him chicken-broth. Later he said without self-pity that he’d like to die. I bluffed, “The doctors think that therapy might help you walk again.” “They’re liars, all of them,” he muttered. Bedfast was never how he hoped to go. “In bed you think of everything,” he whispered with a shrug, “you think of all of your life.” I knew he meant my mother. Without her he was never what he might have been, and everyone who loved him knew it. Nothing could take her place— not the cars he loved to drive, not the money he could earn at will, not the roads he knew by heart from Florida to Saranac, not the two replacement wives who never measured up. 56 Fed now by family or strangers, carried to the john, shaved and changed by hired help, this independent man turned silent at the end. Only my wife could reach him for his private needs. What no one else could do for him, he let her do. She talked to him and held his hand, the left. She helped him bless himself and prayed beside him as my mother might have done. “Darling” was his final word for her. Softly, in Arabic. ...

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