(Lizard on my patio, JMN, photo)
In ‘09 I had congestive heart failure. Good medicine and doctoring fixed it. Over time my ejection fraction rebounded from fifteen (bad) to sixty (normal).
Since ‘10 an appliance that looks like a Zippo lighter rides subcutaneously near my left collarbone — a pacemaker/defibrillator. Three wires snake from it down through a vein to respective sides of my heart (many people need two wires, I need three). They make it beat nice and symmetrical. My cardiologist said, “We’re making your heart more efficient.” Right on.
The gadget has paced me transparently out of a couple of minor arrhythmia episodes I didn’t even know were happening. It has never had to deliver a shock. Knock on wood.
(Andrew, JMN, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in. (C) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
This brings me to my dear neighbor who killed a snake in her yard yesterday. It was fat. She makes a circle with her indices and thumbs: This big. She didn’t know if it was poisonous or not. Who wants to find out? What if it bit one of the pet goats? Or the German shepherd? It lay in a puddle near the gate to the animals’ enclosure, latent with menace. It could’ve been dangerous, who knows? Best kill it.
And that brings me to the dairy farmers in Wisconsin who are contemplating having to slaughter portions of their herd because of a milk glut. “You can’t turn off the cows,” they say. Actually, if you kill a milk cow you’ve indeed turned her off.
In the continuum I inhabit with fellow creatures, I’m lucky to be a member of the species that decides what life is given and what life is taken. That’s as close as I can come at the moment to diluting sadness with celebration.
(C) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.
EthicalDative 
My father at the end
HJN, photo. (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.
I helped him poop and pee; wiped him, washed him, lotioned him, shaved him, fed him, dispensed medicines, tugged his lanky six-foot-three frame back to semi-recumbent each time it slid down his bed.
He was stoic, docile, acknowledging, laconic at eighty-eight. He said I was “meticulous.” He said he understood now where my son, his grandson, had gotten his vocation for nursing. (My son is a Navy nurse.)
I was proud that he had observed me and commented on me. In hospital, he required the covers to be tucked around his feet as only I knew how. “Let my son do it,” he would say. We bonded more in his extremity than we had in previous life. Finally he needed me.
My eulogy at his thronged memorial service concluded: “I don’t know if I was the son Harold ordered, but I’m the son he got. I acknowledge to you that I leaned on him, relied on him, put the touch on him, more frequently and for a longer period of time than I had any right to expect to do. And he allowed himself to be leaned on. He was a support that I didn’t always even know I had, that I took too often for granted, but that I never ran out of.”
(C) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.