Some nights before I started to write this in mid-2022, I dreamt that I was in an aircraft that was plummeting to the earth. I was not surprised by this dream - less than a week had passed since a tragic plane crash in China. What did surprise me was that I had continued to hope that the plane would right itself until the very end. So when I woke up, breathing hard, still alive, what upset me the most about my nightmare was not that the plane had crashed, but that I had not made peace with my death in those final moments. I've spent a lot of time thinking about death in the last two years; many of us probably did as we anxiously watched counters on dashboards, each uptick marking the end of another human life. On nights when my overactive imagination conjured up terrible scenarios, I protected myself by taking a mental step back and reminding myself that death was inevitable. But creating distance made me feel guilty. Was it not wrong to feel anything less than all the sadness I...