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Life & Death

Death as Life’s Picture Frame

Joshua Clements puts us in the picture.

In his book How We Die (1995), medical doctor Sherwin Nuland noted that the people who see death the most – such as doctors and nurses – rarely write about it, and the people who rarely see it write about it the most. He listed poets, essayists, wags, and wise men in the latter group. I admit that I fall into this group, although I am not a wise man, and I am unsure what a wag is. Nuland also noted that a mythology surrounds death, which is meant to disarm the fear of the event. This myth allows us to combine “grace with a sense of closure.

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