Our Best Friend Is Dying. This Controversial Tool Helped Us Laugh.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Two winters ago, more than a year after my old college roommate and dear friend Paul was diagnosed with ALS, he started making pictures. By then, he was gradually losing the ability to do almost everything else. He could still walk at that point, often through the leafy corner of his Boston neighborhood, Jamaica Plain, where the old tree limbs cradled the houses and the streets were barely wide enough for a car, but only with the help of a cane. A condition of the disease called bulbar palsy slowed his tongue to the point his words wobbled enough that he sounded as if he were drunk. He could eat solid foods, albeit with some trouble, and could drink the Relyvrio medication powder he swirled with a spoon into a glass of water twice daily--a prescription for ALS that last year clinical trials suggested was ineffective, and a cocktail so bitter it made him physically wince--but he began coughing more and more as he labored to swallow anything at all.