My Picture Box

How I built my own casket at 68 — and then decided to keep living

My beloved Nana died on St. Patrick’s Day, 1974. The cause was a grand mal seizure. She’d suffered from epilepsy for a number of years. I was twelve or thirteen when I watched her drop to the living room floor while playing the piano at our home in Armonk, convulsing and frothing at the mouth while my mother screamed at me to go get a wooden spoon. It w…