Ann Neumann

Jan 6, 2025 | thebaffler.com | Ann Neumann

In the glass-walled first-floor breakfast room of the Beach Cove Resort in coastal South Carolina, I’ve come to listen in on a group of old spooks and spies. We happen to be sitting just now in the path of Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm that is threatening to submerge the lower floors of this North Myrtle Beach resort’s twin sixteen-story towers. Over our coffee cups we can see violent waves crashing on the white sand outside.

Aug 19, 2024 | nytimes.com | Ann Neumann

THE SLOW ROAD NORTH: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country, by Rosie SchaapIt is a phenomenon known to hospice workers, nurses and priests that the dying often take their last breath once their loved ones have stepped away - say, to get a cup of coffee, take a shower, catch a few minutes of precious sleep. (My own father died while I was out picking up a sandwich.) Some say it is because they are held fast in this world by our voices, hearing being the last lingering sense.

Jun 3, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Ann Neumann |Jasper Craven |Rafia Zakaria |Maz Do

The first time I saw a dying patient suffer through extreme pain came shortly after I joined a hospice volunteer program in Manhattan. I was assigned to visit Marshall, a former welder, who occupied a double room in an all-HIV facility on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side. Our first visit was quiet. Marshall seemed too demoralized by his condition to entertain a guest, so we watched TV. But when I arrived for our second visit, I found him literally doubled over.

May 20, 2024 | theguardian.com | Ann Neumann

Zleke knew that he was being watched. One day in the early summer of 2022, two men knocked on his door. They knew his name and carried pistols, though they wore plain clothes. They took his phone and his ID and told him to come with them. He didn’t resist. Two men in military fatigues with AK-47s waited in the car outside. They drove him from his home on the outskirts of Addis Ababa to a prison house deep in Oromo territory. There was a mattress on the floor and little else.

Nov 28, 2023 | newsbreak.com | Ann Neumann

Mike O’Connor had just been told that his daughter was brain dead. Brittany had been in the hospital for six days. One end of a thick blue tube was taped to her mouth, the other connected to a respirator, which pushed air into her lungs with a mechanical force that shook her chest up and down. Each day, he’d come to her bedside to hope and pray she would open her eyes. And that’s where he was, by her bed, when a policeman entered her room at the intensive care unit at Fresno community hospital.