If you want to be busy, keep trying to be perfect. If you want to be happy, focus on making a difference.

Modern medicine, in short, is getting better and better at staving off death. And as life expectancy in countries like ours continues to grow, the nature of grief has changed.

Would we even have a perspective as to what life is if there was no death? Life is what it is only because death is.

Please indulge me while I tell you a story about coffee. Not about how the beans were first turned into coffee but how it became a marker in my life.

She died in 2008. In 2007, I realized that a lot of my defenses started coming down. I was taking pictures that were more personal, and I was able to better appreciate the little things.

If she had survived, she probably would only have been kept alive through a ventilator. Her death was a parting gift, for she gave me a new life.