There's a quote from a Tool Goande's book Being Mortal, where he says,

endings matter, not just for the person, but perhaps even more for the ones left behind.

Endings matter. They matter in books and podcast movies in

lives, which is what a Tool Goande was talking about. And I think we all want to die as well as

possible, right? Not alone in a hospital bed with our loved ones on FaceTime, not painfully or scared

or anxious but safe and loved. This is the story of a good death. Ron David DePrez had a good death,

and the ending mattered greatly not only to him, but to his daughter Esme.

When we talked to Esme, she was 38 weeks pregnant and a few days out from a scheduled C section.

Right, I just, in the minute that you said 38 weeks pregnant, I felt like that heaviness.

It just started like, oh man, it can feel it had that, okay.

I was like, is it falling out right now? I cannot tell.

Now Esme made it through the entire interview without being once. So for that, we all send a round

of a plus. Esme lives in California, but she grew up in Maine. And like her dad, she's a proud

manor. That's what people in Maine call themselves. Learn something new every day. And being a

manor meant that they did a lot of outdoorsy things. Esme and her dad, they went skiing, they went

hiking, they wore LL bean. Ron is independent. He's self-reliant. And it's not like he sits around

talking about death with his kids, but Esme knows even when she's little what her dad would not want.

The only thing I knew was that my dad was not interested in dying in a hospital or a nursing

home or an institutional setting like that, hooked up to tubes. He had kind of always said, you know,

I'd rather go back in the woods with my glauque and end it there if I have a terminal illness.

Ron was a public health epidemiologist who went to Harvard. He was athletic. He ran 18 marathons

in his life, 18 borderline too many. And he was also notoriously cheap.

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