{"id":2003,"date":"2012-03-14T17:00:25","date_gmt":"2012-03-14T21:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=2003"},"modified":"2012-03-14T08:41:00","modified_gmt":"2012-03-14T12:41:00","slug":"honor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2012\/03\/14\/honor\/","title":{"rendered":"Honor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My friend Nick just died, a year after he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.\u00a0 Bonnie, his wife of 35 years, took care of him through the months of treatment and gradual decline.<\/p>\n<p>Our tribe of friends and family did what we could&#8211;visits, food, a few simple errands and, mostly, just being there.<\/p>\n<p>You reach a certain age and the people with whom you&#8217;ve shared big chunks of your life start to die. It pretty much stinks. No flowery lessons or epiphanies to offer here, except this: it is truly an honor to be allowed to just be there for a friend who is dying or a friend who is tending to a dying loved one.<\/p>\n<p>There are people who can&#8217;t understand how anyone could work for hospice. Too depressing, they say. I don&#8217;t know. I watched our friend Kathleen, a hospice nurse, be there for Nick and Bonnie.\u00a0 Another honor to see her calm competence make the situation as good as it could be.<\/p>\n<p>This death, like those of others I&#8217;ve cared about and loved, makes me think how precious it is&#8211;what an honor it is&#8211;to call someone friend.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve lost someone close, you know about, what I call, &#8220;the bubble.&#8221; You enter a kind of nether-zone for a while. Time warps a bit. Thanks for stepping into the bubble for a moment&#8230;and being there with me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My friend Nick just died, a year after he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.\u00a0 Bonnie, [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}