P.J. O’Rourke wrote about death in 2008, after he was diagnosed with a different kind of cancer than the one that apparently killed him this morning. The piece is at once surprisingly reverent and typically irreverent.
Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God’s grace. (Although this option is not usually open to reporters.) …
Thus, the next time I glimpse death … well, I’m not going over and introducing myself. I’m not giving the grim reaper fist daps. But I’ll remind myself to try, at least, to thank God for death. And then I’ll thank God, with all my heart, for whiskey.