Death means many things to those who are so far estranged from it, and it is likely that any true understanding of it is foreign to all of us, but I chose to believe that when certain people draw close to it they find a vast wealth of discovery. Even amongst these few I am willing to concede many of them may lack the presence of mind in these final moments to truly evaluate these lessons, but still I like to believe there are some that wield a tranquility in these most anxious moments. I’d like to address myself here, if you’ll permit, and call back my statement regarding the inability of the living to understand death. As science advances we collect more and more data on what happens when one dies, how it can be prevented, even how it can be reversed, and these things alter our evaluations and our discussions of death, but primarily I feel they serve to abstract if further. It’s this abstraction that’s chiefly the point here. We can know all the facts of death up to the very moment that it cannot be reversed, and I think it safe to say even the reversal process is its own special breed of trauma, but until we have known of our certain demise we cannot understand what it will be like. I feel it is almost certain that when we take those of us who fall into our category of the tranquil condemned that they have had intense moments of self realization that are perhaps incomparable to any other. What I’m trying to get at here is perhaps best illustrated with a bit of a story. In world war I there were countless battles of immense tragedy, and many men met many makers over the course of them, but at Verdun let’s say, there was positively at least one Frenchman, whose last thoughts as cannon fire thundered upon his position where not of home, or his dog, or a lovely sweetheart. No, he realized in his final hours he had long harboured only one wish, “Damn, I really wish I’d gotten Dan to roger me up the bum.”