It's not humane to make a mockery of death

Death is the one human experience that connects everyone, regardless of color, creed, class or bank account. The inequity comes only in its manner and timing.

For Ted Flowers, my father, it came on a beautiful May morning, the day before Mother’s Day in 1982. It came after a year of agony, in the form of a brutal tumor in his lungs that had exploded into the farthest reaches of his battered, belov...