Two years ago, my Uncle John had a massive stroke.

The MRIs showed three quarters of his brain had been destroyed by the bleeding. I still remember the pictures - a malignant stain spreading from one hemisphere to the other.

Uncle John was a hale and hearty man at 79. He might have had a paunch (what male member of the Smallholder clan doesn’t), but he was strong and fit. He worked on the day he died.

The day he died his body kept breathing. Everything that made John, well, John, disappeared as the ruptured veins drowned his cerebral cortex. The mind and soul were gone. All that was left was a shell.

After the doctors confirmed that there was no chance of recovery, my family moved its patriarch to a hospice. Withholding food and water, they tended his shell for days until the stubborn body shut down.

At the funeral, my cousins talked about how hard it was to care for the shell. To have to clean up the natural processes of their formerly proud and independent father was heartbreaking. Occasionally, John’s body would groan and twitch. Now, being the sturdy, pragmatic types produced by diary farms throughout the Midwest, they intellectually realized that those groans, sighs, and spasms were artifacts of the dying process, not John’s attempts to send message to his family. But it was still hard.

Another cousin, a black sheep of the family (my father says that after you shake hands with him, you ought to count your fingers), has become born again. Born again in a way that lets you feel morally superior without imposing inconvenient restrictions on your own behavior. At family gatherings, his unctuous, oily demeanor always drives me to flee to the other side of the room.

This guy walks up to John’s kids and says: “It was wrong to take him out of the hospital. If you had left him on life support, God might have miraculously healed your father.”

Johnny told him that that would have been fine if he was willing to move his born-again backside to Elkhorn and spend his life wiping his uncle’s butt.

Johnny was kinder than I would have been. When Johnny related this conversation, I wanted to walk across the room and pop said holier-than-thou miracle boy in the nose.