The hospital was a place where the dying could undergo the indignities of death without offending the sensibilities of the living. In my high school, my classmates

One gentleman cremated by Bayside was just twenty-one—close to my age at the time. Twenty-one years is time enough to be a fuck-up, sure, but not time enough to be a lost cause.

our neurons break connections and form new pathways all the time. Even if you’ve been programmed to fear death, that particular pathway isn’t set in stone. Each of us is responsible for seeking out new knowledge and creating new mental circuits.

Death represented a failure of the medical system; it would not be permitted to upset the patients or their families.

Death as the great equalizer needs no better example than the two men brought in to Westwind: a twenty-one-year-old homeless man and a forty-five-year-old aerospace engineering executive. Where the bodies of Golden Gate jumpers

Albert Camus said it best: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.” On the

We don’t need to stop at green or natural burial. “Burial” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word birgan, “to conceal.” Not everyone wants to be concealed under the earth. I don't want to be concealed.

Death should be known. Known as a difficult mental, physical, and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.

Dying in the sanitary environment of a hospital is a relatively new concept. In the late nineteenth century, dying at a hospital was reserved for indigents, the people who had nothing and no one. Given the choice, a person wanted to die at home in their bed, surrounded by friends and family. As late as the beginning of the twentieth century, more