LOS ANGELES — Everywhere Jay Westbrook turns, behind the wheel of his black pickup, a memory flashes.
In Van Nuys, it is the lifeless little girl he held at Valley Presbyterian Hospital after she was found in the bottom of a hot tub. Near Beverly Hills, it is the old woman in a seven-figure condo whose misery he tried to soothe. On Skid Row, it is the 29-year-old crack addict he brought morphine to numb the pain of cancer, as she died in a box on the street.
There have been thousands of them, thousands of souls he journeyed with to the intersection of living and dying, who helped establish him as one of the foremost experts on care in a patient’s final days. Thousands of deaths that collectively formed his life.
It might have gone on this way forever. Then came one death too many.
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The first time was a cluster of machines and tubes, and breaths shallow and panting. Westbrook was a student nurse, the patient a big man, swollen from cirrhosis. Westbrook had cared for the man for several weeks and when the time finally came, a profound sadness drove him to tears.