How Much Will It Cost to Die?
A weird essay about the future.
It cost my mom $30,000 to die.
I’m rounding here.
I never saw every bill for myself. My dad talked about some of them, and that’s the amount I know. It was probably more.
Last month, they charged my dad $100,000 to remove some kidney stones and run some tests on his heart. His healthcare plan covered it this time. What about the next? If that’s how much it costs for a relatively simple procedure, I suspect the cost of dying has gone up a lot since my mom’s exit.
Meanwhile, we’ve got family living in western North Carolina. They gave us an update on the recovery efforts there. It’s still utter devastation everywhere. “How long do you think it’ll take?” my dad asked them. “You know, to rebuild?”
“Ten years,” said my brother-in-law. “At least ten.”
That’s occupying my headspace right now. Not Sydney Sweeney. Not the Epstein files. Not all the noise and virtue signalling.
That.
This is the real world. It’s a world where you go to a birthday party and you don’t debate politics or the clima…