A dying man still sat for a legal deposition while his bone marrow failed.

Evidence

Roland Gamache was dying of leukemia by the time his second deposition began. Neither he nor his wife could admit this to each other. But the lawyers all knew. In early October, Gamache did not have strength enough to get out of bed. His bone marrow had stopped producing red blood cells and, as a result, every cell in his body was slowly asphyxiating. He received a blood transfusion and began a new round of chemotherapy, and he felt well enough to travel to Boston for his deposition. “The last three months have been very difficult,” he told his examiner, one of Cheeseman’s assistants. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 1329

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The dying plaintiff submitting to interrogation is the whole moral weight of the litigation compressed into one scene — decorum toward the dying holding out as long as the process does.
• FICTION: A deposition taken from a man who knows he is dying, annotating his own slow asphyxiation, is a ready-made short-story scene.