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the forties and fifties, people still died of old age. Old age was actually a common cause of death. My parents inevitably visited dying persons over the long or short period of their decline; sometimes I went with them. Some years ago, as an adult, I accompanied my mother to visit a very old neighbor who was dying a few doors down the street, and though she was no longer living in the country, the country style lingered. People like my mother were visiting her constantly, bringing food, picking up and returning laundry, or simply stopping by to inquire how she was feeling and to chat. Her house, her linen, her skin all glowed with cleanliness. She lay propped against pillows so that by merely turning her head she could watch the postman approaching, friends and relatives arriving, and, most of all, the small children playing beside the street, often in her yard, the sound of their play a lively music.
    Sitting in the dimly lit, spotless room, listening to the lengthy but warm-with-shared-memories silences between my mother and Mrs. Davis was extraordinarily pleasant. Her white hair gleamed against her kissable black skin, and her bed was covered with one of the most intricately patterned quilts I’d ever seen—a companion to the dozen or more she’d stored in a closet, which, when I expressed interest, she invited me to see.
    I thought her dying one of the most reassuring events I’d ever witnessed. She was calm, she seemed ready, her affairs were in order. She was respected and loved. In short, Mrs. Davis was having an excellent death. A week later, when she had actually died, I felt this all the more because she had left, in me, the indelible knowledge that such a death is possible. And that cancer and nuclear annihilation are truly obscene alternatives. And surely, teaching this very vividly is one of the things an excellent death is supposed to do.
    To die miserably of self-induced sickness is an aberration we take as normal; but it is crucial that we remember and teach our children that there are other ways.
    For myself, for all of us, I want a death like Mrs. Davis’s. One in which we will ripen and ripen further, as richly as fruit, and then fall slowly into the caring arms of our friends and other people we know. People who will remember the good days and the bad, the names of lovers and grandchildren, the time sorrow almost broke, the time loving friendship healed.
    It must become a right of every person to die of old age. And if we secure this right for ourselves, we can, coincidentally, assure it for the planet. And that, as they say, will be excellence, which is, perhaps, only another name for health.
    1985

THE OLD ARTIST:
NOTES ON MR. SWEET
    [For many years after writing “To Hell with Dying” I thought of how good it would be as a story for children, proving as it does that imperfection is no barrier to love, one of the great fears that children have. Alas, no appropriate illustrator could be found. And then one day one was found, and the book was published: To Hell with Dying, illustrations by Catherine Deeter. The editor asked how the story came about.]
    I like to use the case of Mr. Sweet, in “To Hell with Dying,” as an example of a story that is “autobiographical” (is this or that piece autobiographical? some puzzled reader is always asking), though little of it ever happened. The love happened, and that is the essence of the story.
    There was, in fact, in my rural, farming, middle-Georgia childhood, in the late forties and early fifties, an old guitar player called Mr. Sweet. If people had used his given name, he would have been called Mr. Little; obviously nobody agreed that this was accurate. Sweet was. The only distinct memory I have is of him playing his guitar while sitting in an ancient, homemade (by my grandfather) oak-bottomed chair in my grandmother’s cozy kitchen while she baked biscuits and a smothered chicken. He called the guitar his “box.” I must have been eight or nine