placed a hand on my shoulder, gold orbiting three knuckles. It’s going to be okay, he said, and for the first time, I considered that it might not be. It is one thing to experience death and another to understand it to be possible on its own terms. To grasp the certainty of its arrival but still cling to a hope for that certainty to come in a very specific way, at a very specific time, after a life has fulfilled all of its promise. Death, ushering a person toward an upturned beam of light after they’ve thrown up their hands and said Thank you, my life has been good, I want to see the people I
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