Aleon DeVore woke in the night last week struggling to take what she feared would be her last breaths.
She rang for her aides at Lakewood’s Hospice of St. John, wanting to ask what it feels like to die.
“How would they know? How would anyone know?” she told herself. “It seemed silly to ask.”
Instead, DeVore asked for something else — help filling out the absentee ballot at her bedside. An aide stood witness as she dictated to a nurse the names of her chosen candidates.
“I have to be honest. To heck with the amendments,” the former newspaper columnist said of the bevy of ballot measures that she skipped because “they’re as poorly written as cellphone instructions.”
DeVore signed her ballot and would have been done with it had she not stuck her “I Voted” sticker on her forehead before falling back to sleep with the help of some morphine.
“Where else would you put it?” she said of the white oval with the American flag she’s still wearing seven days later.
Hospice staff secure the sticker with fresh tape each morning because the adhesive has worn off. She has instructed them not to wash her forehead until after Election Day.
DeVore is dying of congestive heart failure, a condition she describes as a slow leak in her 88-year-old ticker. She’s remarkably with-it for someone drugged up on painkillers. And she’s notably upbeat for someone whose days, even hours, are numbered.
Still, she worries about the future and how a failing economy might affect her two kids, four grandchildren and three great-grandkids.
Having lost a brother in World War II, she opposes what she sees as unnecessary American deaths in Iraq.
Having worked as a writing coach and columnist with the Littleton Independent, she frets that kids these days can’t conjugate their verbs.
And watching now as hospice orderlies clean up after her with so many plastic bags, she fears for the health of the planet.
The lifelong Democrat has never missed an election as part of a promise she made to her husband, Bill DeVore, a man she met on a bus and who died at St. John hospice in 1985. She aims to hang on until Nov. 4 to see the day when her candidate might win the presidency.
“We finally need someone who knows people, someone who really loves them like Barack Obama does and can lead us to change,” she said of a history she won’t live to witness in a world she sees only in a swatch of sky from the maroon recliner where she will spend the rest of her days.
But as DeVore tells it, the sticker she wears like a beauty mark is about something bigger than any one candidate or any single election. Call it America. Call it democracy. Call it basic humanity. We are a chain of people, she says. And before she goes, she wants to make sure her link is strong.
“I’m still here for a reason, and I’m pretty sure this is it,” she said. “It says Aleon DeVore has voted, and if you’re smart, you’ll get off your fat duff and vote too.
“It says I threw more good rocks into the pond than I threw bad and care about the world even though I’m on my way out the door.
“And, darn it, I want to die with a clear conscience.”
May we all go like Aleon — old and hopeful, with such peace and purpose. And, if need be, with stickers on our heads.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
