The emails have been arriving with depressing regularity. Often the subject line is only the name of a friend. With dread I know what the message will contain: That person has died. In recent weeks there have been seven such losses. Three came in a 10-day period, and I fell into sadness.
The first death that registered in my life was my Aunt Hulda, my father's sister, who was laid out in the front parlor and I was allowed to kneel at the coffin, cross myself, and say a prayer before this strange, pale, motionless body. More than ten years later, my grandmother died. I was in high school now, and this death was more real. When my father died at the beginning of my freshman year in college, that was a blow to my existence. He had been the towering figure in my life.
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