eating binds us to life, and each meal nails us to the wheel of the world, and dying people need more than anything else to be able to dissolve a little at a time what binds them to life, especially to the metabolic and physical life. When dying people stop eating they are voting “no” to keeping on. Often it is not even a decision. It is more as though the body’s own wisdom, its understanding of how to stop continuing, is announcing itself. It is a wisdom that is absolutely faithful and quietly resolute at the end of a person’s life. Dying is groping in a dark room for the door that will let
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