With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial

by Kathryn Mannix

Instead of dying in a dear and familiar room with people we love around us, we now die in ambulances and emergency rooms and intensive care units, our loved ones separated from us by the machinery of life preservation.

normal birth is probably more uncomfortable than normal dying, yet people have come to associate the idea of dying with pain and indignity that are rarely the case.

There are only two days with fewer than twenty-four hours in each lifetime, sitting like bookends astride our lives: one is celebrated every year, yet it is the other that makes us see living as precious.