***Sara Lynne Wright is a physician assistant in geriatric primary care at Stanford Health Care.***

Why do we shy away from the sunset of life, even though sunset can be the most beautiful part of the day? Can’t the sunset of life be beautiful too?

Ben Teasdale’s “The Astronaut” (Intima, Spring 2022) and Shireen Heidari’s “Waiting” (Intima, Spring 2022) elicit these questions. Like my piece “Nay Nay’s Rebirth” (Intima, Spring 2022), these stories demonstrate how expressions of love can lead to a more fulfilling and even beautiful—though inevitably painful—farewell to life.

Teasdale writes from the perspective of a medical student witnessing a husband tending to his wife in the hospital as her condition rapidly declines. The last line of the story is, “Though the sun has long since set, he shows no signs of leaving.” But this is the student’s imagining; he does not actually know what happens to the couple after he ends his shift.

What the student does see is that, for the husband, the sun has not yet set on his wife. The husband tends to her every physical need. Recalling how they fell in love taking a physics class together, the husband tells her she looks like an astronaut in her oxygen mask. At this, her eyes seem to twinkle and her mouth turns up. Even when she can no longer breathe on her own, she can reciprocate his expression of love.

Heidari writes, “How often do we prevent people from getting close to the people they love in the end because of tubes, lines, alarms, or hospital rules?” Because of such devices and rules, the narrator of my story, an elderly patient with dementia, does not want to go to the hospital and instead prefers to stay home and enjoy hallucinations of her loving mother. Heidari goes on to say, “There’s something beautiful and necessary about reclaiming space in a hospital room for people to hold each other again.” Our stories make it clear that, whether in the hospital or at home, holding each other in the last moments of life can make it easier to let go.

Sara Lynne Wright is a physician assistant in geriatric primary care at Stanford Health Care. Her pieces have been published in Stanford Medicine's Anastomosis, Stanford Scope, and Blood and Thunder.