05/31/2026
Looking for a Good Death— A Personal Essay
By Wayne Stephen, Spring 2026
My mom is 83 years old.
As I write this, she's lying in a hospital bed in Northwest Arkansas. The situation is still new enough that I don't really know what comes next. Each phone call so far seems to bring a different answer. Overall, it seems encouraging. I guess, no gnus is good gnus.
She's been transferred once already. There are talks of rehabilitation, strength, therapy, and getting her back on her feet. Then there are the quieter conversations. The ones we don’t quite finishes.
Now, before everybody starts writing the obituary, let's be clear about som**hing.
Donna is still here.
She's still fighting.
And if you've learned anything about her so far, you already know she hates losing.
For all I know, this hospital stay is just a temporary trip to the sidelines before she starts talking s**t at a card table again.
This essay isn't really about what happens next.
Nobody knows that part yet.
What it has done, however, is get me thinking about som**hing I've spent most of my life trying not to think about.
Death.
Not because my mother is gone. Because one day she will be.
Just like me.
And somewhere between a hospital bed in Arkansas and a card table in Mankato, I found myself wondering if I've been asking the wrong questions all these years.
Donna wasn't supposed to make it this far.
At least not according to the rules.
She smoked. She drank. She worked her ass off because that's what people like Donna did. If there was a problem, you worked. If there wasn't a problem, you worked anyway.
She raised kids, survived heartbreaks, buried people she loved, and somehow kept moving. Part of me assumes she'll beat whatever odds again because that's just what she does. Another part of me knows we're operating on borrowed time.
Then again, maybe we've always been operating on borrowed time.
The thing I remember most about my mom isn't her smoking, partying or laughing when I was a kid—though those memories are frozen solid in the evidence room in the basement of my mind.
Outside of her fierce loyalty and love for me....
It's passion. And competition.
Donna loved to win.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite things was watching her and my sister Melody play softball together on the Carlson Craft company team. They were both solid athletes. Tough. Competitive. The kind of people who disliked losing more than they enjoyed winning.
But the softball field wasn't where Donna truly reigned. Not even close.
That was the bowling alley.
Or a card table.
Put a deck of cards in her hands and she became som**hing else entirely. Sharper. Faster. More focused. She loved the game, but she also loved the battle hiding inside the game.
It was her legendary skill as a performer and talker that canonized her at card tables.
Truth be told, the entire Barnes family could teach a master class in table talk. Every aunt. Every uncle. Half the game was the cards. The other half was the running commentary.
But don't confuse storytelling with softness.
When it came to cards, Donna played to win.
Especially Buck Euchre... *smack!.....That was my mom reaching across the table to cuff me upside the head for calling it "Buck Euchre", instead of "Pfeffer"— the Southern Minnesota German-American roots hybrid version.
Outsiders call it Buck Euchre.
Around Mankato, around the Barnes family, it was Pfeffer.
Maybe "Buck" on a good day.
Maybe....If you were looking for an argument.
Later on, she discovered golf through her new love, my stepdad John. John was a lifelong golfer. Damn near a scratch golfer.
He brought Donna into the game.
She promptly scored a hole-in-one during her first year on the course—a feat John had yet to accomplish himself....he he.
Some people have all the luck.
Donna would tell you she earned it.
And she had very little patience for self-pity.
"Quit yer go'ddam whining."
I heard that a couple.... hundred times growing up.
Probably because I was usually whining.
At the time it felt harsh.
Now I understand it differently.
Life is hard.
Play the next hand.
Which may be why it's so strange to picture her in a hospital bed now.
I've spent most of my life collecting evidence against death.
My father died before I ever knew him. My brother Jay died when I was sixteen. My sister Melody is gone. A nephew. Grandparents. Cousins. My best friend in fifth grade. Friends from addiction. Friends from kitchens. Friends from life.
—Not unlike the people reading this.
And then there are the losses that don't come with funerals.
My adult children and I don't speak.
They're alive.
They’re safe. Healthy. Living their lives.
For that, I'm grateful.
But I'd be lying if I said it doesn't feel like a kinduv death sometimes.
Maybe not death exactly.
Som**hing stranger.
Death closes the book.
Estrangement leaves it open on the table.
No obituary.
No final conversation.
No certainty.
Just the hope that maybe the story isn't over yet.
Enough funerals that I no longer remember the church venues.
Enough grief that certain songs still ambush me decades later.
But the reality is, my pain isn't special. Everybody loses people, and everybody eventually joins this club whether they want to or not.
What feels special, are the people.
Jay wasn't interchangeable.
Melody wasn't interchangeable.
My nephew Korey wasn't interchangeable.
The friends I've buried weren't interchangeable.
That's why I say their names.
Not to elevate my grief.....Hell no.
To honor their lives.
Because remembering people is one of the few things death hasn't figured out how to take from us.
Death has been a recurring character in my story for as long as I can remember, and yet here I am at fifty-five trying to understand whether I've been asking the wrong question.
Not whether death hurts.
Of course it hurts.
The empty chair hurts.
The unanswered phone call hurts.
The stories that never get told hurt.
The missing hurts.
But what if grief and death are not the same thing?
That distinction has been following me around for a while.
A deeper part of this investigation began with a dying sociology professor named Morrie Schwartz. Most people know him from the book, Tuesdays with Morrie. The book is usually shelved under inspiration or self-help. I think that's selling it short.
What Morrie was really doing was reporting from the edge.
He wasn't teaching people how to die. He was teaching people how to stop pretending they weren't.
As ALS slowly dismantled his body, he became less interested in fighting reality and more interested in understanding it. Not because he welcomed death. Not because he enjoyed suffering. But because he understood that arguing with inevitability is exhausting fu***ng work.
One sentence in particular from the book stuck in my head:
Learn how to die, and you learn how to live.
At first I hated it.
It sounded like som**hing you'd find embroidered on a pillow.
Then I realized Morrie wasn't talking about death at all.
He was talking about scarcity.
If we lived forever, nothing would matter much. We could make the phone call next year. Write the book next decade. Say "I love you" sometime later. The deadline is what gives the day value.
Thats the real cold piece.
The final chapter is what makes the story matter.
Oddly enough, those ecologists nerds have arrived at a similar conclusion.
Walk through an old forest and find a fallen tree. Most people see a co**se.
The forest doesn't seem particularly bothered by death.
A tree falls and everybody gets to work.
Moss.
Fungi.
Beetles.
New saplings.
The dead tree starts feeding the next generation before it's even finished falling apart.
Sunuva bitch.....
Without death, forests eventually collapse under their own success. Older generations consume all the light, all the nutrients, all that makes space for the next.
Nature figured this out a long time ago.
Humans are still negotiating with the contract.
Maybe because we're the only creatures who know it's coming.
The deer doesn't know.
The oak doesn't know.
The loon on our bay doesn't know.
We do.
And that's both our burden and our gift.
Lately I've found myself noticing things I usually ignore.
The morning coffee.
The dogs.
The phone calls.
The ordinary stuff.
The things that feel permanent right up until they don't.
Maybe that's what Morrie was trying to say. Maybe the awareness of death doesn't teach us about death at all. Maybe it just shines a brighter light on the life that remains.
I'm not sure.
I'm still working on that part.
My mom has lived through wars, presidents, recessions, marriages, funerals, grandchildren, and enough stress to make a cardiologist faint. She has survived things that should have stopped her years ago.
Eighty-three years isn't a tragedy.
It's a hell of a run.....and she aint done.
The older I get, the less interested I am in arguing with death.
Not because I like it.
Not because I've made peace with it.
Mostly because death keeps winning the argument.
Sooner or later, nobody gets outta this thing alive.
The question isn't whether that's fair.
The question is what we're supposed to do with that knowledge while we're still here.
Maybe acceptance isn't a destination. Maybe it's a practice. Som**hing we work on the same way we work on gardening, cooking, writing, karaoke.... slowly, imperfectly, and over time.
But now I find myself wondering whether I've spent too much energy treating death as an enemy and not enough time trying to understand it.
I don't want the people I love to leave.
I don't want my mom to leave.
I don't want another funeral.
I don't want another empty chair.
Those things aren't going to change.
What may be changing is my understanding of the bargain.
Everything I've ever loved came with an ending attached.
Jay did.
Melody did.
My dogs did.
Momma Donna will.
So will I.
Maybe that's the cost of loving anything at all.
Morrie said that once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.
I don't know if that's true yet.
Ask me again in a few years.
Ask me after I know how it feels to be 95, and have everyone you know leave this world before you.
For now, all I know is that an eighty-three-year-old woman who spent her life working, bowling, playing cards, smoking and telling her son to quit his goddam whining is lying in a hospital bed hundreds of miles away.
And somewhere in all of this, I'm trying to understand what makes a good death.
For most of my life, I thought that was the question.
Now I'm not so sure.
