Author Description

"Last Rights" is a story of three brothers: Matthew helps people die-sometimes by offering advice and other times by giving what he calls "the full service." Jacob scraped his way through law school and tries to wash away his working class roots by fleeing upstate New York for Manhattan. Calvin is a New York State Trooper. Matthew watched his mother suffer from lung cancer and regrets standing idly by while she died, fighting for air. So, he made the decision to help people die. Things go smoothly until he falls in love with a terminally ill woman who asks him for help with killing herself. Matthew struggles internally; his ideological beliefs conflict with his selfish desire to keep her alive. He delivers a pistol to her and waits outside while she uses it. Despondent over her death and tired of working in shadows, Matthew orchestrates a death where his brother Calvin must arrest him. He asks his brother Jacob to defend him at trial. To Matthew, the criminal case is both a mechanism that can condone his actions and punish him for his guilt. The trial tests the brother's allegiance to each other and forces them to deal with the demons of their common past. The three brothers hail from a working class broken home in upstate New York. Each brother fought his own way to a better life and they grew apart in the process. Matthew's arrest forces them back together. It is a story of reconciliation, freedom, morality, life and the immutability of personal history.