Hi Corinne- Thanks for the kind remarks and your insightful analysis. American society seems uncomfortable with death. We usher the elderly into assisted living communities and seldom visit. When people die, we call the mortuary. We don’t prepare the bodies like people once did. We shun conversations about illness and death until it suddenly arrives. Our culture is enamored with youth and beauty rather than experience and wisdom. Of course there are exceptions and glimmers of hope. My wife, a hospice nurse, is seeing more families interested in confronting and experiencing death as a natural part of life. But it seems a lot of folks age, and then are unprepared for the hardships. And society seems to ignore the elderly as irrelevant, thus alienating these broken souls. My hope is that people read and think more about the trajectory of their lives, and that society finds a way to embrace the wisdom of our seniors, rather than ignore them. Thanks for reading!