Postpone

In no setting, perhaps, is this more evident than in a hospital. There, the stretches of borrowed time are laid their most plain and bare. After I pore over a screen of lab values and vital signs bolded and in red — aberrations from faltering organs — and amid tangles of tubes and the whir of life-sustaining machines, before their illness comes to claim them, a patient may express a circumstance they hope will come to pass.

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