Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.”

Whether my mortality caught me at twenty-eight or ninety-three, I made the choice to die content, slipped into the nothingness, my atoms becoming the very fog that cloaked the trees. The silence of death, of the cemetery, was no punishment, but a reward for a life well lived.

The last thing preventing me from accepting death was, ironically, my desire to help people accept death.