"We hide death as if it were shameful and dirty. We see in it only horror, meaninglessness, useless struggle and suffering, an intolerable scandal, whereas it is our life's culmination, its crowning moment, and what gives it both sense and worth.
"It is nevertheless an immense mystery, a great question mark that we carry in our very marrow.
"I know that I will die one day, although I don't know how, or when. There's a place deep inside me where I know this. I know I'll have to leave the people I love, unless, of course they leave me first.
"This deepest, most private awareness is, paradoxically, what binds me to every other human being. It's why everyman's death touches me. It allows me to penetrate to the heart of the only true question: So what does my life mean?
"Those who are privileged to accompany someone in life's final moments know that they are entering the most intimate of times. Before dying, the person will try to leave his or her essence with those who remain — a gesture, a word, sometimes just a look to convey what really counts and what thus far has been left — either from inability or inarticulacy — unsaid.
"Death, which we will live to the end one day, will strike our loved ones and our friends, is perhaps what pushes us not to be content with living on the surface of things and people, pushes us to enter into the heart and depth of them.
"After years of accompanying people through the living of their final moments, I do not know any more about death itself, but my trust in life has only increased. I am certain that I live more intensely and more awarely those joys and sorrows that I am given to live, and also all the little, daily, automatic things — like the simple fact of breathing or walking.
"I may also have become more attentive to the people around me, aware that I will not always have them at my side, longing to explore them and to contribute as much as I can to what they are becoming and what they are called to become.
"Moreover, after spending years with what are called 'the dying,' although they are in every way 'the living' until the very end, my own sense of aliveness is more intense than ever. I owe this to those I have imagined myself to be accompanying, but who, in the humility of their suffering, have revealed themselves as masters."