Take It Easy

B.J. Miller is a regular guy who, one November night in 1990, went out for drinks with his fellow Princetonians. But unlike his fellow students, Miller only returned to campus a year later with three amputated limbs.

The then-student, who wanted to work in foreign relations, is now a doctor. Inspired by his own experience, he started a clinic in San Francisco that offers palliative care to the dying.

This article follows Miller through the difficult journey of making sense of his injuries without drowning in self-pity. By not “regarding his injuries as something to get over, Miller tried to get into them, to see his new life as its own novel challenge, like traveling through a country whose language he didn’t speak.” That, you may argue, is easier said than done. But Miller would disagree. He truly believes that disability is merely a word that’s defined by people, not the other way around. Moreover, the purpose of his clinic, Zen Hospice, is to 'de-pathologise death'.

In this article, we also get introduced to one of Miller’s patients. Randy is a young man who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. He visits Zen Hospice, and through his experience and that of his parents and friends, we get a better understanding of what palliative care means.

This article is an insightful meditation on dying, how we die and what we’re supposed to do before that happens - should it be something big and meaningful or just something ordinary? It goes without saying that there’s no straight answer for that question. Some prefer to do a bucket-list kind of thing, others to revere in routine. But the choice itself doesn’t really matter. Anything goes, as long as it helps you to accept the idea that you are - inevitably - going to die.