Thomas Browne’s words, or Lamb’s, might have reassured me at my grandmother’s coffin. That day would surely have been a lot easier for me, and its memory less painful, had I but known that not only my own grandmother but indeed everyone becomes littler with death—when the human spirit departs, it takes with it the vital stuffing of life. Then, only the inanimate corpus remains, which is the least of all the things that make us human.
