As an adolescent I skipped over the fascination-with-death phase. Horror movies repelled me, gore disgusted me. I forged on well into my twenties, thousands of miles from elderly relations and still in possession of most of my grandparents, in blithe denial of mortality.
It caught up with me, of course, at times slow and furtive and at others with breath-taking abruptness. To say I have come to terms with death would be overstating. But in the course of close encounters spread over several decades, I have laid hold of hope—one that persists in the face of fear, grief, loss, and all the other realities inseparable from death.