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?

— Marie de Hennezel, Intimate Death by Marie de Hennezel, Carol Brown Janeway, translator