Ailing elderly trying to hang on until the Mueller report

NPR's Morning Edition report on the elderly and the Mueller investigation would seem to suggest that maybe we're too invested in politics.

Add "I just wanted to hang on to read the Mueller investigation" to "I wish I'd spent more time at the office" among phrases that shouldn't be our last words.

But Mitchell Tendler came by his honestly. He fought in World War II and lived through historical milestones. And at age 93, he'd become pretty obsessed with the guy in the White House.

So he had real concerns when he took ill in December and his heart was giving up.

"It just was quiet for a little while," his son, Walter, tells NPR, "and then he just sits up in bed halfway and looks at me and he goes, 'S***, I'm not going to see the Mueller report, am I?' And that was really the last coherent thing that he said."

Do you laugh or do you cry?

"I know exactly how he feels. I feel the same way. I've been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer," Richard Armstrong, of New Jersey, told NPR.

He's a Republican and an independent.

"I was hoping to live to see the outcome of what I think it should be — justice. I'll be surprised and disappointed if it isn't," Armstrong said.

All of these revelations seem to have come after Benjamin Wittes at Brookings tweeted Tendler's last words.

"When I saw that tweet about the Mueller report and the old man on his death bed, I thought, oh my gosh, that's the kind of thing that my mother would say," said Kristina Makansi, who lives in Tucson, Ariz.

Her mother passed away in January at the age of 94. "I think she really wanted to see that justice was done... and that the investigation was allowed to proceed without any shenanigans and obstruction."

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