*** Time for this post?  Reading…a minute. Viewing…15 minutes. 

Last week I wrote about how we use euphemisms to replace the word “death” because we consider it a harsh and ugly reality.

What if we did as philosopher-comic Emily Levine did. When faced with a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer, she looked for ways to make sense of life, living, dying, and death.

A television writer, producer, and filmmaker, Emily Levine spent her life tearing apart classics and physics and pop culture, and then, in trickster fashion, putting them together in ways that got us thinking differently. “Her goal was to short-circuit your mind, to shake you out of your silly old and/or thinking with a little bit of and/and.” Here is her view of death, after she had befriended it:

’I’ am just a collection of particles that is arranged into this pattern, then will decompose and be available, all of its constituent parts, to nature, to reorganize into another pattern. To me, that is so exciting, and it makes me even more grateful to be part of that process.