This week's lesson, late and bracing, and mingling dread-fully with my own inevitable 40-something musings on mortality: the end comes, not trundled up in some far off tomorrow--for we all feel, if we are honest, that there will be an infinity of such tomorrows--but today, here, now, this instant. When it comes to steal away those we love, "the end" is the understudy that appears unbidden on life's poor stage, and strides deafeningly into the "now's" warm limelight. It materializes in a blinding instant, from the corner of our eye, moving faster and stealthier than we can fathom, stealing away everything, and leaving in its place a gaping chasm that innocence and youth are never meant to behold.

"There are many forms of silence," Diane Ackerman said, "The silence of one's DNA when one is scattered dust, the silence of neurons sparkling in the lens of a scanning electron microscope, the silence inside the ear when a phone call ends, the silence thick with the silences of loved ones, the silence of other paths one might have taken, the silence of recluse firmaments glimpsed through a telescope, the silence of the crying baby one never had, the silence of snow pressed against one's closed eyelids, the silence of the fog left by one's breath on a chilly morning, the silence of your name before you were born, the silence of slow-motion memories, the silence of quaking aspen leaves viewed through a window, the silence of the heart's stilled motor. Death is the silence in an invisible valise carried under one arm."

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