As dying people are trying to find their way out of their bodies and out of their lives, the job of the living is to know how hard that is and to get out of their way. Dying is enormously hard. The labor of it—and it is labor, of the same kind as that which brings life into the world—is relentless, demanding. The shock of having to see your days as numbered in the dozens, of seeing your body heading out of town, of seeing yourself as mostly passed, these are in some ways ruinous and costly encounters with the way it is.
