It's Labor Day and I'm not getting my labor done because the conversation is too interesting! I'm trying to get old wallpaper
off the guest bedroom so I can repaper it before company comes..


"Everyone wants to know the details of dying, though few are willing to say so. Whether to anticipate the events of our own final illness or better to comprehend what is happening to a mortally stricken loved one - or more likely out of that id-borne fascination with death we all share - we are lured by thoughts of life's ending. To most people, death remains a hidden secret, as eroticized as it is feared. We are irrestibily attracted by the very anxieties we find most terrifying; we are drawn to them by a primitive excitement that arises from flirtation with danger. Moth and flames, mankind and death - there is little difference.

None of us seems psychologically able to cope with the thought of our own state of death, with the idea of a permanent unconsciousness in which there is neither void nor vacuum - in which there is simply nothing. It seems so different from the nothing that preceded life. As with every other looming terror and looming temptation, we seek ways to deny the power of death and the icy hold in which it grips human thought. Its constant closeness has always inspired traditional methods by which we consciously and unconsciously disguise its reality, such as folk tales, allegories, dreams, and even jokes. In recent generations, we have added something new: We have created the method of modern dying. Modern dying takes place in the modern hospital, where it can be hidden, cleansed of its organic blight, and finally packaged for modern burial. We can now deny the power not only of death but of nature itself. We hide our faces from its face, but still we spread our fingers just a bit, because there is something in us that cannot resist a peek."

---------How We Die by Sherwin B. Nuland

And I especially liked this..."The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been."

*********************

Now stop entertaining me...I have work to do!!