Winter
My grandfather approached the winter of his life with great difficulty - always a man who prized his ability to actualize his goals through working with his hands and mind, being forced to rely on the help of others was catastrophic to his sense of self. His eyes weakened, his strength diminished, and he began to approach life with what would only be considered a passively suicidal world-view: he ate poorly, told most close to him that he was desired death, and fought incessantly with his wife. The last note I ever saw written in his hand was that he never wanted to be kept alive through machines - and that he was very proud of his children and grand-children and that he had lived a good, wonderful life. While much in his life seemed dissonant to this final thought - maybe it was a sign of where things began, in being unhappy that, while his body betrayed his will, that the world, as it was during a formative period of trust, was a basically good place, and that he was better for being along for the ride.