"Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death."

"Only this body, suddenly reduced by her capitulation to being a body and nothing more, hardly differed at all from a corpse – a poor defenseless carcass turned and manipulated by professional hands, one in which life seemed to carry on only because of its own stupid momentum. For me, my mother had always been there, and I had never seriously thought that some day, that soon I should see her go. Her death, like her birth, had its place in some legendary time. When I said to myself ‘She is of an age to die’ the words were devoid of meaning, as so many words are. For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence."