DEATH AS THE REASON FOR THE DEATH OF MEANING AND VALUE
I write this just weeks away from my 84th birthday. I don’t know that I’m more aware of my coming departure from this so-called life than I was when I was ten. I was surely aware of my ultimate fate before that. My grandmother had died when I was 8, and I have a vague recollection of learning that one of my schoolmates at about that time had been struck by lightning and killed. But I was ten when my mother found me curled up in a fetal position in the bed she shared with my father crying. She asked me what was wrong and I said “I don’t want to die.” My mother’s response was curious on reflection. She was essentiallly uneducated, an immigrant from southern Italy, and an untutored Roman Catholic who had populated our Brooklyn apartment with pictures and statues of saints and had hung crosses on the walls. Thinking back, I would have thought that she would have comforted me by pointing out that when I died I would go to heaven where I would live forever with all of my family and