I was pleased and honored that the family of a friend of mine called to ask if I would partition the quarter acre from their farm that they needed to create a family cemetery. A quarter acre was the minimum amount of land necessary to create a family cemetery in Maine.
My friend moved to Maine in the mid 1970s and bought, with his wife, a large spread of some of the most lovely fields and woods you can imagine. The worked, farmed, raised children and retirement was not in his vocabulary. While he lived an exemplary life, it is the manner of his death that I wish to tell you about in the hope that some meaning will be found in it.
He was working in his yard when he collapsed with a heart attack. He told his wife to drive him to the hospital. They got in the car and drove off, he asked his wife to go to the inland hospital instead of the closer one by the shore because the inland hospital had a reputation of being less expensive. He died before they reached the hospital.
His choices reflected his concern about the cost of health care. There were three nearby ambulance companies that might have arrived quickly and stabilized him during a trip to the hospital. Our healthcare system is over due for a top to bottom reform. No one should be excluded from receiving basic medical care on economic grounds alone.
