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.

The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created.

Each of us is responsible for seeking out new knowledge and creating new mental circuits.

A culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death.

But rational interaction, that ends with you realizing that you will survive the worst, whatever the worst may be. Accepting death doesn’t mean that you won’t be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like “Why do people die?” and “Why is this happening to me?” Death isn’t happening to you. Death is happening to us all.

The great achievements of humanity were born out of the deadlines imposed by death.

“The meaning of life is that it ends.”

Because this ever-growing geriatric army reminds us of our own mortality, we push them into the shadows.