The Socrates Express

14. How to Die like Montaigne

11:27 a.m. On board TGV train No. 8433, en route from Paris to Bordeaux.

Outside, a gray sky swaddles the French countryside like a down blanket. Inside, uncertainty reigns. We have slipped on board without a reserved seat. We must change seats at every station, as more passengers board. It makes for an unsettled journey. Just as I get acquainted with my seat, I’m evicted and have to start again.

This is the way of unreserved train travel, and of philosophy, too. Just as we become comfortable with a certain position—all knowledge is derived from the senses, for instance—something upends our certainty and we must begin again. It’s exhausting, this constant fleeing from comfort and certainty, but necessary.

I glance at Sonya, wired into her digital world, unfazed by our displacements. Why can’t I be more like her, I wonder?

I am wrapping my mind around this thought, getting comfortable with it, when my cogitation is jarred by another influx of passengers. I gather my Old Man books and Old Man pens and amble down the aisle, in search of a new home.

Picture an enormous swimming pool: one large enough to hold seven billion people. No one has ever seen the pool, but there’s no denying its existence. At some point, everyone is thrown into the pool. Most are tossed when they’re older, but some are tossed in middle age and a few while still young. Only the timing is in question. No one escapes being thrown into the pool. No one has ever emerged.

Given all these facts, you’d think there’d be enormous public interest in the pool. Questions. How deep is the pool? Is the water warm or cold? How can I prepare for getting tossed in the pool? Is this tossing something I should fear?

Yet people rarely discuss the pool and, when they do, it is indirectly. Some people won’t even utter the words “swimming pool.” They’ll say “body of water” or, more obliquely, the “big you-know-what.” Teachers do not discuss the pool with their students. Parents (with few exceptions) do not discuss it with their children. It is considered impolite to raise the swimming pool at dinner parties or other social occasions. People steadfastly avoid even thinking about the pool. Better, they conclude, to leave it to the pool professionals.

Yet, try as they might to push it away, the giant swimming pool is always there, looming in the back of their minds like an unseen watery monster. As they sip their lattes, file their expense reports, tuck their children into bed, a question, faint but undeniable, bubbles into consciousness: Is today the day I get tossed in the pool?

All the philosophers I’ve encountered on my journey speak to me. Some more loudly than others. None speaks as loudly and clearly as Michel de Montaigne. The sixteenth-century Frenchman is the philosopher I most want to have a beer with. I see myself in Montaigne, and Montaigne in me. It is not so much his ideas but how he arrives at them—circuitously, tentatively—that attracts me. Montaigne gets me. He is my philosophical soul mate.

Like me, Montaigne is restless in mind and body. Like me, he enjoys traveling but enjoys coming home more. Like me, he is a compulsive underliner and annotator. Like me, he has atrocious handwriting and struggles to unscramble what he’s written. Like me, he is terrible with money and extraordinarily incompetent in the world of business. (“I would rather do anything than read through a contract.”) Like me, he can’t cook. (“If you give me all the equipment of a kitchen, I shall starve.”) Like me, he engages with the world but periodically has a strong, almost irresistible need to flee it. Like me, he is moody. Like me, he is uncomfortable writing about himself but does so anyway. Like me, he has two, and only two, speeds: fast and slow. Like me, Montaigne fears death. Unlike me, he faces his fear head-on.

Death makes philosophers of us all. Even the least contemplative person wonders at some point: What happens when we die? Is death really something to fear? How can I come to terms with it? Death is philosophy’s true test. If philosophy can’t help us deal with life’s most momentous and terrifying event, what good is it? As Montaigne puts it: “All the wisdom and reasoning in the world boils down finally to this point: to teach us not to be afraid to die.”

Yet most philosophers approach death the way the rest of us do: by ignoring, or dreading, it. Marcus Aurelius sank into a deep funk whenever he thought of death. Schopenhauer worried how historians might mangle his ideas once he was gone.

Best not to think about death, concludes Epicurus. “Death is nothing to us.” You don’t wake every morning worrying about the time before you were born, so why worry about death? You were absent then and you shall be absent again. “When we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, we do not exist.”

I’m not buying it. The nothing that was me before I was born is not the same nothing that will be me after I’m gone. One is a nothing that was always nothing while the other is a nothing that was once something, and that makes all the difference. The void of space and a hole in the earth are not the same. Nothingness is defined by its proximity to what was, and what still is.

Montaigne read Epicurus, and others, on the subject of death and wasn’t satisfied, either. They touched the subject superficially, “barely brushing the crust of it,” he says. He was determined to dive deeper—and did. No philosopher writes about death and dying more honestly and courageously than Michel de Montaigne.

Just as Beauvoir obsessed about growing old, Montaigne obsessed about death, or, to be more specific, dying. “It is not death; it is dying that alarms me,” he said. It occupied his mind when he was ill and when he was well, even “in the most licentious seasons of my life… amid ladies and games.”

I can’t blame him. At the time, the sixteenth century, death was in the air. “Gripping us by the throat,” Montaigne says. Catholics and Protestants were killing each other at an alarming rate. War was only one way to die. The plague killed nearly half the residents of Bordeaux. Only one of Montaigne’s six children survived infancy. His brother Arnaud was just twenty-three years old when he died in a freak accident involving a tennis ball. Killed by a tennis ball! Death is absurd. If it weren’t so final, we’d laugh it off.

The death that stung the most was that of Montaigne’s close friend Étienne de La Boétie. When he died of the plague at age thirty-two, Montaigne felt “as if I had been cut in half.”

Death may not cast as long of a shadow over our day as it did Montaigne’s, but that is small comfort. A shorter shadow is no less dark. Then, as now, the odds of a human being dying are precisely 100 percent, with a margin of error of zero. Everyone gets thrown in the pool.

Grief can crush. Grief can paralyze. Grief can also motivate. It was grief that drove a heartbroken Mughal emperor named Shah Jahan to build the Taj Mahal in memory of his beloved wife. It was grief—over the loss of his wife, daughter, and eyesight—that inspired Milton to pen Paradise Lost. And it was grief that propelled Michel de Montaigne up three winding flights of stairs to the top floor of a red-roofed tower, perched high atop a hill and exposed to the winds, and where he would pen his Essays. From great suffering great beauty arises.

Sonya and I climb a circular staircase, the same one Montaigne climbed some 450 years ago. This is where he savored his solitude. I suspect Montaigne was, like me, an introvert capable of doing a decent extrovert imitation when circumstances demanded. We can fool the world, we outgoing introverts, but at a personal cost. All this feigned extroverting drains us. Exhausts us.

The tower is largely unchanged from Montaigne’s day. The three narrow windows overlooking the Aquitaine countryside are still here. So is Montaigne’s writing desk and his saddles. He loved everything about his tower. He loved the way it overlooked the family vineyard. He loved the quiet. He loved how, wherever he looked, his eyes alighted on a book.

His treasured library began with a gift from La Boétie, who insisted Montaigne accept the books as “a remembrance of your friend.” Montaigne did, reluctantly at first, hauling the books up the spiral stairs and carefully arranging them on shelves. He grew to love his library, and it grew, too. By the time of his death, Montaigne had amassed one thousand volumes.

He’d spend hours, days, in his tower, alone with his books and his thoughts. Distance mattered for Montaigne. Alone in his tower, he cleaved himself from the world out there, and, in a way, from himself, too. He took a step back in order to see himself more clearly, the way one half-steps away from a mirror. We are too close to ourselves to see ourselves. “We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose,” he writes. So, move your nose. Stick it here, then there. Exterior distance makes interior closeness possible.

It was here, in his beloved tower, that Montaigne ended his conversation with the world and began one with himself. “It is time to turn my back on company,” he said, “and retire into my shell like a tortoise.”

I look up and see wisdom staring back at me: some fifty quotations carved into the rafters. Among the ancient sayings is one of Montaigne’s own: Que sais-je: “What do I know?” These four words neatly sum up his philosophy, and his way of life.

Montaigne was a Skeptic, in the word’s original meaning: not a naysayer who punctures the ideas of others for sport but a doubter in search of truth. Montaigne doubted so he could be certain. He built his tower of certainty one doubt at a time.

Humans, he thought, can never know absolute truth. The best we can do is snare provisional, contingent truths. Truth nuggets. These truth nuggets are not fixed but fluid. “Flutterings,” Montaigne calls them. You can flutter a long way though, and Montaigne did.

Montaigne, like Thoreau, had angular vision. He held up an idea and looked at it from various perspectives. He did this with everything, even his cat. Was he playing with his cat or was his cat playing with him? he wondered. That notion is pure Montaigne. Take something everyone knows—everyone thinks they know—and test it. Play with it. You think you know what death is, says Montaigne, but do you? Play with it.

Socrates did. Maybe death isn’t so bad, he wondered aloud after his death sentence was handed down. Maybe it is a pleasant “dreamless sleep,” or maybe there really is an afterlife. Wouldn’t that be great, said the gadfly of Athens, imagining himself happily spending eternity philosophizing and annoying people with his pesky questions.

Like Socrates, Montaigne was, by his own account, “an accidental philosopher.” A personal one, too. He amuses himself, irritates himself, and surprises himself. What I admire about Montaigne is how, rather than dismissing these thoughts as mindless fancies, he examines them. He took himself but not his philosophy seriously. “Know thyself,” the Greeks implore but don’t tell us how. Montaigne does. You know yourself by taking chances, making mistakes, then starting over, Sisyphus-like.

Montaigne needed a literary form for his accidental philosophy. None existed, so he invented one: the essay. From the French assay, it means “try.” An assay is a trial, an attempt. His essays are one giant attempt. At what? At getting to know himself. He couldn’t die well until he lived well and he couldn’t live until he knew himself.

Montaigne is no more linear on the page than in life. Like Sei Shōnagon, he is practicing zuihitsu: following his brush. He writes about cannibals and chastity, idleness and drunkenness, flatulence and thumbs. Salted meats, too. He writes about his itchy ears and his painful kidney stones. He writes about his penis. He writes about sleep and sadness, smells, friendship, children. He writes about sex and he writes about death. But the true subject of Montaigne’s book is Montaigne. “I presented myself to myself,” he says, calling it “a wild and monstrous plan.”

Humans excel at denying inconvenient truths, and no truth is more inconvenient than death. I look at death the way I look at my aging visage in the mirror. Sideways, if at all. A desperate, and futile, attempt to inoculate myself against its bite.

Montaigne thought avoidance comes at too high a price. When we avoid death, “every other pleasure is snuffed out.” We can’t live fully, he says, without facing death, our death, fully. “Let us rid it of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it. Let us have nothing on our minds as often as death. At every moment, let us picture it in our imagination in all its aspects. At the stumbling of a horse, the fall of a tile, the slightest pinprick. Let us promptly chew on this: well, what if it was death itself?”

Death can come at any time, Montaigne reminds us, noting that the Greek playwright Aeschylus was supposedly killed by a falling tortoise shell dropped by an eagle. “We must always be booted and ready to go.”

I toggle between Montaigne’s tower and Saint-Émilion, one of those perfect little French towns that make you wonder why everyone isn’t French. It is just me and Montaigne. Sonya has retreated into Adolescent World, rarely emerging from the hotel. Each morning, I lug my copy of The Complete Essays of Montaigne, stretching to some 850 pages, and order a double espresso at a local café. It is a low-rent place, populated by chain-smokers steadying their morning beers on shaky tables. The café also does a brisk business in cheap wine and lottery tickets. I am drawn to these sorts of slovenly places. They make fewer demands of me. I can think more clearly.

Montaigne, I learn, is a fully embodied philosopher. He walks. He rides his horse. He eats. He fucks. What Henry Miller said of the philosopher Hermann von Keyserling holds true for Montaigne as well. “He is a thinker who attacks with the whole body, who emerges at the end of a book bleeding from every pore.”

Montaigne tells me he has a quick, firm walk, and that he is short and stocky. He has chestnut-brown hair, and a face “not fat but full.” He is proud of his teeth, straight and white. He loves poetry, hates the summer heat. He can’t bear the scent of his own sweat. He never has his hair cut after dinner. He likes to sleep in. He takes his time while defecating and hates to be interrupted. He is a poor athlete, save for horseback riding, in which he excels. He dislikes small talk. He loves chess and checkers but is inept at both. He dreams that he dreams. He has a poor memory. He eats quickly, greedily, occasionally biting his tongue or even a finger. He dilutes his wine with water, like the ancient Greeks.

Montaigne’s is a patchwork philosophy, a quilt of borrowed ideas. He puts his stamp on them, makes them his own. Montaigne trusts his own experience in a way we—I—do not.

It took him a while. The earlier essays “smelt a little of the property of others,” he says, but with each page he grows more confident, bolder. I find myself rooting for him. I do so even when he dings me for snoozing during one of his long digressions. (“It’s the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I.”) I applaud as he finds his voice. Though trained to borrow and beg, he says, we are each “richer than we think.”

Montaigne isn’t afraid to contradict himself. He reverses his stance on matters large and small. Radishes, for instance. First they disagree with him, then agree, then disagree.

Nowhere is he more inconsistent than on the subject of death. In his earlier essays, Montaigne believes study and contemplation can free a man from the horrors of dying. “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die” is the title of one essay. By the end, he has fully reversed course. To philosophize, he concludes, is to learn to live. Death is the end, but not the goal, of life.

Montaigne did not have a death wish. He had a life wish. Yet he knew this wish could not be fully realized without coming to terms with death. We might think life and death are strictly sequential: we live, then we die. The truth, says Montaigne, is that “death mingles and fuses with our lives throughout.” We don’t die because we are sick. We die because we are alive.

Montaigne thinks of death in ways I didn’t believe possible. Not only does he contemplate it but he plays with it and even—I realize this sounds odd—befriends it. “I want death to have a share in the ease and comfort of my life. It is a great and important part of it.”

I struggle with this idea. I’m not sure I want death to be a part of my life, great or otherwise. How, I wonder, can I come to terms with death while keeping it at a safe distance?

You can’t, says Montaigne. You must, if not befriend death, then at least defang it. You think of death as the enemy, something out there. Wrong. “Death is the condition of your creation. It is a part of you. You are fleeing from your own selves.” We must reorient ourselves toward death. It is not an “it” and you are not its victim.

Montaigne, an experimenter like Gandhi, believed in trying anything once. “We must push against a door to know it is closed to us,” he said. No door is more closed than death. Still, we must push. Don’t mock death until you’ve tried it, he says.

What are you talking about, Michel? We can rehearse for many events—weddings, bar mitzvahs, job interviews—but surely not for death. There are experts on death and dying but no expert “diers.” (My spellcheck doesn’t even recognize the word.) We can’t practice dying. Or can we? Montaigne did.

The year is 1569. Montaigne is riding, not far from his house. He has selected a gentle, compliant horse. He’s made this journey many times, and thinks he is perfectly safe, when another rider, astride a powerful workhorse, attempts to pass him at full speed. “[He] hit us like a thunderbolt with all his strength and weight, sending us both head over heels,” recalls Montaigne.

Montaigne, thrown from his horse, is lying on the ground, bruised and bleeding, with “no more motion or feeling than a log.” Passersby were convinced he was dead. But then they detected slight movement. They lifted Montaigne to his feet, and he promptly “threw up a whole bucketful of clots of pure blood.”

“It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tips of my lips,” he recalls. Oddly, he experienced neither pain nor fear. He closed his eyes and took pleasure in letting himself go, as if sliding gently into sleep. If this is death, Montaigne thought, it’s not so bad, not bad at all.

Friends carried him home. He saw his house but did not recognize it. People offered him various remedies. He refused them all, convinced he was mortally wounded. Yet, still, he felt no pain, no fear—only “infinite sweetness.” It would have been, he recalled, “a very happy death.” He let himself slip away gradually, effortlessly.

Then he began to recover, and with his revival came pain. “It seemed to me that a flash of lightning was striking my soul with a violent shock, and that I was coming back from the other world.”

The accident had a profound effect on Montaigne. He questioned his assumption that death is something we can’t practice. Maybe we can. Maybe we can give it a try, an assay. We can’t see death itself but we can “at least glimpse it and explore the approaches to it.”

Death is not something we master, like chess or winemaking. It is not a skill. It is an orientation, one aligned with nature. “There is nothing useless in nature, not even uselessness itself,” says Montaigne. Death is not life’s failure but its natural outcome.

Slowly, Montaigne begins to approach death “not as a catastrophe but as something beautiful and inevitable,” like an autumn leaf falling from a tree. The leaf doesn’t worry about how to fall, and nor should we. “If you do not know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do the job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.”

Will she, Michel? I hope so. She is awfully mercurial. One moment she’s blooming cherry blossoms, the next she’s unleashing a category 5 hurricane. I don’t subscribe to the if-it’s-natural-it-must-be-good theory. Cockroaches are natural. Earthquakes are natural. Nasal hair is natural.

What does a good death look like? It usually (but not always) comes at the end of a good life. The atmospherics are important, too. The less drama, the better. Too often, in Montaigne’s day, a dying person was surrounded by “a number of pale and weeping servants, a darkened room, lighted candles; our bedside besieged by doctors and preachers; in short, everything horror and fright around us.” Today, our hospital rooms are lit by fluorescent, not candlelight. But the doctors and preachers are still there, as is the horror and fright.

My most intimate experience with death was watching my father-in-law die. He died two ways: slowly, then quickly. A disease called frontotemporal dementia explained the paranoia, and the anger. A stroke sent him to the hospital, then a nursing home, then, when his kidneys shut down, back to the hospital. We knew it was the end. The doctors knew, too. Yet nobody acknowledged it. A conspiracy of silence enveloped the hospital room, and we were all unindicted co-conspirators. Such is the charade of feigned ignorance that defines dying in our age.

I watched my father-in-law’s chest heave up and down, his eyes glazed over by the morphine while a cockpit’s worth of machines beeped and pinged. I fixated on one screen, which monitored his oxygenation levels. Forty-five then 75, then down to 40. I watched the number fluctuate, as if the act of watching would somehow keep him alive. Medical technology comforts us by numbing us and numbs us by distracting us. As long as the machines beep and the screens flash, all is well.

Montaigne would not approve. It’s not the palliative care that would distress him but the denial. Technology distances us from the reality of death, which is nothing more and nothing less than nature. Since we are part of nature, we are only distancing ourselves from ourselves. Fleeing ourselves. One beep at a time. He’d look at the flashing monitors and the pinging cardiograph and the metered IV drips and see clear as day what was missing from the room: acceptance.

The remedy for death is not more life—any more than the remedy for despair is hope. Both states call for the same medicine: acceptance. That is where Montaigne, like Beauvoir, ends up. Not a half-hearted acceptance but a full and generous one. Acceptance of death, yes, but of life, too, and of himself. Acceptance of his positive traits (“To say less of yourself than is true is stupidity, not modesty”) and acceptance of his flaws as well. Like idleness. Montaigne often chastised himself for wasting time. Eventually he realized how silly that was. “We are great fools, ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say; ‘I have done nothing today.’ What, have you not lived?”

It’s a truism that men make lousy patients. It is a truism that happens to be true. I am a big baby when I’m sick. Montaigne was, too. Unlike me, he suffered from an actual illness: painful kidney stones that tormented him for much of his adult life. Montaigne cursed “the stone,” which had killed his father and now threatened to take him, too.

Illness is nature’s way of preparing us for death, easing us into it. Just as a tooth falls out, painlessly, so, too, do we slip away from ourselves. To go from healthy to dead is too much for us to bear, but “the leap is not so cruel from a painful life to no life,” he says.

Montaigne is suggesting a radically different version of the “good death.” We consider a good death one that follows a brief illness, or no illness at all. No, says Montaigne. Too big a leap. Better to slip away gradually than fall suddenly.

On the one hand, Montaigne’s slippage theory makes sense. Better a small fall than a large one. But try telling that to someone in mid-fall. For the past few years, I’ve watched my mother-in-law fall, as Parkinson’s disease steals her, piece by piece. First, it took her steady gait, then her ability to walk at all. Not satisfied with this plunder, it went after her mind, robbing her of the ability to read a book or conduct a conversation. When her final fall comes, yes, it will be a small one, but only because she’s been plummeting for a long time now. Illness may be nature’s way of preparing us for death but, as I know from public speaking, it’s possible to overprepare. Sometimes we’re better off blustering into a situation, ignorant of the risks. And sometimes a big fall is better than a small one.

Like Montaigne, I, too, am starting to slip away from myself. My hair slipped away several decades ago, along with my washboard abs and unblemished skin. As far as I’m concerned, that’s enough slippage. Can we stop now? I don’t want to die, nature be damned. I could get used to immortality. Or could I?

Simone de Beauvoir plays with that question in her novel All Men Are Mortal. The protagonist is an Italian nobleman named Raymond Fosca. He is immortal, thanks to a potion he drank back in the fourteenth century. At first he considers immortality an incredible blessing, and strives to put it to good use. He wants to improve the lives of his people. Yet he comes to view his immortality as a curse. Everyone he loves dies. He is bored. (Even his dreams are boring.) He lacks generosity since, as an immortal, he has nothing to sacrifice. His life lacks urgency, and vitality. We may fear death, but the alternative, immortality, is far worse.

An awareness of death enables us to live more fully. The ancient Egyptians knew this. In the midst of feasts, they carted in skeletons to remind guests of their fate. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew this. “Persuade yourself that each new day that dawns will be your last,” says the poet Horace, “then you will receive each unexpected hour with gratitude.”

Montaigne died in his chateau on September 13, 1592, at age fifty-nine. He was not old. The cause of death was quinsy, a painful abscess in the throat caused by an infected tonsil. In his final days, he was unable to speak, an especially cruel affliction for a man who considered conversation “sweeter than any other action in life.”

In his final hours, he summoned his household staff and paid them their inheritance. A friend reports that he “tasted and took death with sweetness.” We don’t know much more. Was that sweetness of the “infinite” variety he reported after his riding accident—or something else? Did Montaigne, in the end, feel cheated of a few more years?

Driving our dread of death is not only fear but greed. We want more days, more years, and when, against all odds, we receive those, we want more still. Why? wondered Montaigne. If you have lived one day, you have lived them all. “There is no other light, no other night. This sun, this moon, these stars, the way they are arranged, all of these are the very same your ancestors enjoyed and will entertain your grandchildren.” When my time comes, I hope I can hold on to Montaigne’s words.

No, chides Michel. Not my words. Yours. There is no such thing as an impersonal insight. Borrowed truths fit about as well as borrowed underwear, and are just as icky. You either know something in your heart or you don’t know it at all. Live your life not as a standardized exam but, like Gandhi, as one grand experiment. In this sort of personal, lived philosophy, the goal is not abstract knowledge but personal truths: not to know that but simply to know. There’s an enormous difference. I know that love is an important human emotion and has many health benefits. I know I love my daughter.

Montaigne’s philosophy boils down to this: Trust yourself. Trust your experiences. Trust your doubts, too. Let them guide you through life, and to the threshold of death. Cultivate the capacity to be surprised, by others and by yourself. Tickle yourself. Remain open to the possibility of possibility. And, for God’s sake, says Montaigne, joining hands with his compatriot Simone Weil, pay attention.

When I return to the hotel after a visit to Montaigne’s tower, I grab a notebook and pen and assay to describe what I have seen. I draw a blank. Nothing. I wasn’t paying attention. “Damn it,” I say aloud.

“Give me a piece of paper,” a voice replies.

Who said that? The voice is coming from the far side of the room. It sounds familiar.

“Sonya?”

“Give me a piece of paper, Dad.”

She has roused from hibernation. I hand her a piece of paper and a pencil. She begins to write, to draw. After five minutes, she hands me the paper.

I’m floored. She has drawn a remarkably accurate rendering of Montaigne’s tower, in great detail and complete with labels such as “Window Number Two” and “Old Horse Saddle Number Three.” I had assumed the tour of Montaigne’s tower bored her and that she had mentally checked out. Not for the first, or last, time I remind myself to always question assumptions.

A few days later, Sonya hands me another piece of paper: translations of the sayings carved into the rafters of Montaigne’s tower. Glancing at the paper, one short quotation stands out. From the Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus: “It is possible and it is not possible.”

I stare at the quote for a long time. It’s one of those philosophical riddles that are either extremely wise or extremely absurd. Possibly both. I decide to try it out, assay it, Montaigne-style. Old Man pen in hand, I write in my Old Man notebook:

It is not possible for a 16th-century flatulent Frenchman with itchy ears to teach us anything. It is possible.

It is not possible to travel to France with a moody thirteen-year-old and maintain your sanity—even learn a thing or two about life, and death. It is possible.

It is not possible to face death—and, yes, life—fearlessly and intimately. It is possible.

At least I think it is. What do I know?