In Sam Shepard’s posthumous novella, Spy of the First Person, we are the young observer or the observed dying old man confined to a mostly likely stolen rocking chair when at home or a wheelchair, whose reflections on his life, family, immigrants, medical treatment, and the people who have haunted the changing American West drift by us like a broken, but lucid, dream brought on by prescription drugs and tequila. We should all be so fortunate to have such unsympathetic clarity in our recollections as disease bends us toward our death.
