• such is life

    It Is What It Is

    Those were the heart wrenching last words a friend dying of brain cancer said to me. It wasn’t our whole conversation, but those words — words of complete abandonment, acceptance, resignation — are the ones that stuck with me. He was a young man, a son, a brother, a friend…a bartender. On his last days, I found myself laughing in his mom’s kitchen as he showed me his mixology techniques. “Come with me,” he said. “Let me make you a drink.” And so I followed him to the kitchen. His movements slow; his words a slur, after a stroke paralyzed a side of his body. Still, he insisted in fixing…