In 2020, I saw my aunt for the last time. She had been diagnosed with ALS two years before, after extensive medical tests in which at first she had only believed it was a stroke that had occurred. However, after a progressive decline of her health and multiple doctors she was finally diagnosed with ALS. 
     She was always such a strong, independent woman who was well educated. There was no one else in my family who had ever had ALS before. It came on so quickly that I watched the decline of someone I knew my whole life, basically get crumbled by this disease. By the end of the year she was diagnosed, she had lost the ability to walk and struggled with talking. She had a caretaker that lived with her to help her through the day. She was well known by the ALS community and it helped her get some of the support for the funding of all the extra accessibility needs. 

     However, being the independent woman my aunt was , she never wanted to lose the ability to eat or talk. She couldn't imagine a life in which she had a tube for her meals, she always loved to eat her whole life. She made the choice to get medical assisted suicide to still feel like she had a choice. The last time I saw her, she asked me to make her pancakes with the same recipe her mom ( my grandmother) use to make her when she was a child. We sat , ate and shared in memories of the past, she sent me on my way with a bunch of her belongings and no knowledge of the choice she had made for her own dignity. The next afternoon, after hearing of that she was gone ,  I thought back to why she hadn't told me the day before . I was thinking that she never wanted anyone to worry about her or take away her choice. 
      
  So now with my choice , I choose to walk. Walk to fund such a rapidly destructive disease and hope to find a cure.  For the future , I walk. For her, I walk. And I will continue to walk for the future.