Chapter 57: Whose Life Is It, Whose Death Is It?
In the quiet, hallowed spaces where the known world bleeds into the great Unknown, we cease to be detached witnesses or medical observers; we become, by necessity, cartographers of the soul. A profound case in point is my wife Sharon’s former vocation as a hospice nurse. She was never solely defined by the clinical administration of morphine or the sterile adjustment of oxygen flows. These were but the physical rituals attending a far profounder event. Her work was, in its truest essence, a form of spiritual midwifery.
Those who stand at the edge of the Great Mystery see more than just the end of physical life. They watch as the ego fades, the firm structures of self loosening, like feathers readying for one last, migratory flight. Through the lives Sharon cared for, she came to see that the path toward death isn’t an end to existence, but a deep lesson in letting go, forgiving, and marveling at the intricate design of the human spirit.
In the quiet fabric of life, where birth and death are simply threads woven by the same loom, there are stories that shed light on the mysteries of our final path. These are echoes of moments—snapshots of courage, denial, and the unwavering spirit of those who showed Sharon and me the true art of living by teaching us how to face the end.
Gloria: The Harmony of Transition
Consider Gloria. Her room had become a sanctuary, a liminal space suspended between the temporal demands of the body and the eternal pull of the spirit. Her husband, Merwyn, and daughter, Michele, stood as sentinels of a fierce, terrestrial love, yet they found themselves helpless against the encroaching silence. The medical directives had become a source of profound confusion; Merwyn wrestled with the logic of prescribing antibiotics to a woman who could no longer eat or drink, a woman whose body was rejecting the very sustenance of life. He was caught in the agonizing friction between fixing and allowing. He crushed pills into applesauce, a desperate sacrament of preservation, trying to coax them past Gloria’s tightly sealed lips. But she was signaling a different need.
It was the harpist who finally bridged the divide. As she plucked the strings, the air in the room shifted, vibrating with a resonance that felt less like music and more like a vehicle for transport. We often speak of the “struggle” against death, but Gloria taught about the harmony of transition. As the harpist played, weaving a tapestry of sound that seemed to mimic the celestial spheres, Gloria’s breathing—the Cheyne-Stokes rhythm that signals the body’s final labor—began to synchronize with the melody. It was a symbiotic dance. The music did not fight the silence; it carried it. With the final, shimmering chord, Gloria exhaled her last earth-bound breath. It was a masterclass in vibrational alignment; the soul, hearing a frequency it recognized, simply stepped out of the heavy garment of the body and followed the sound home. In that moment, the room was not empty; it was full of a haunting, inexplicably beautiful peace.
Melanie: The Pioneer’s Compass
This peace, however, is rarely won without a journey. Melanie, a woman of fierce intellect and spiritual hunger, viewed her dying not as a tragedy but as a “pioneer trip.” She was venturing into unmapped territory, and like any explorer, she sought markers. She refused intravenous fluids, understanding intuitively that to hydrate the body artificially was to anchor a ship that was trying to set sail. “I need a guide,” she told Sharon, her eyes scanning the horizon of her own mortality. She wasn’t asking for medical prognosis; she was asking for hermeneutics—she needed someone to help interpret the signs of the soul’s dismantling.
She constructed her own compass in the garden. There, amidst the untamed growth, she built an altar centered around a Peace Rose. This was not merely horticulture; it was a mandala of acceptance. The rose, unfolding in its slow, deliberate beauty, became her teacher. It did not resist the fading of the light; it did not mourn the falling of its petals. Melanie would sit for hours, absorbing the botanical wisdom of the cycle. In the architecture of that flower, she found the blueprint for her own release—a softening, an opening, and finally, a letting go of the center. She taught that the natural world is not just a backdrop for our lives but a mirror for our passing.
Mary: The Archaeology of the Bond
Yet, the roots that bind us to this earth are deep, tangled in the complex soil of family history. Mary’s journey was a study of the mother-daughter bond. Recovering from pneumonia after a third stroke, her relationship with her daughter Joan was fraught with the tension of control and the desperate, often clumsy, language of love. As Mary’s autonomy waned, and her ability to complete sentences fractured under the weight of neurological damage, she found solace in the sensory. The scent of Skin-So-Soft lotion became a trigger to release aspects of her past now buried in forgetfulness, a sensory artifact of a time when Mary was the architect of her own domain.
Her 87th birthday party was less a celebration of age and more a ritual of dissolution. She clutched a photograph of deceased family members, a visual anchor to the other side, speaking as if she were already gone. The room was thick with the unspoken, the air heavy with the weight of imminent departure. In these gatherings, the true theatre of the human condition is witnessed: the desperate need to be remembered clashing with the absolute necessity of leaving. Mary, frail and fading, held court one last time, her presence a fading signal fire. In the aftermath of the cake and the forced cheer, the silence that followed was the true goodbye. It was the realization that we do not own our parents; we only borrow them from the infinite, and the debt must eventually be paid.
Floyd: The Spiritual Ledger
This accounting of a life is a recurring theme in the final days. Floyd, a man of simple means but profound depth, wrestled with the ledger of his soul. He missed his wife and brother, the loneliness pressing in on him like a physical weight. He spoke of Green Stamps—those relics of a bygone commercial era where one collected tokens to redeem for a prize. “I’ve been pasting stamps in my book my whole life,” he mused. It was a startlingly lucid metaphor for the human endeavor. We spend our decades accumulating acts of service, moments of love, and sacrifices, pasting them into the books of our memory, hoping that at the end, they amount to something redeemable.
Floyd questioned the value of his book. Had he filled it? Was the merchandise of his life worth the cost? As he declined, his fear of becoming a burden grew, a shadow darkening his final days. It was only when he encountered the poem “The Story of a River” that his spiritual accounting shifted. The poem speaks of the river trembling with fear as it approaches the sea, looking back at the winding path it has carved. The river fears the extinction of its individuality, the loss of its banks. But the wisdom of the water is that it does not disappear into the ocean; it becomes the ocean. Floyd realized that his “Green Stamps” were not currency to buy an afterlife, but the very substance of the water he was contributing to the cosmic sea. His fear of the waterfall—the moment of death—transmuted into a surrender to the vastness. He stopped counting stamps and started trusting the current.
Tom: The Physics of Forgiveness
Regret, however, can be a dam in that river. Tom carried the heavy stones of past wrongdoings, his soul burdened by a history he could not rewrite. Yet, even in the winter of his life, he sought to plant seeds. His desire to create a “Garden of Hope and Forgiveness” was a profound act of spiritual agronomy. He sat outside, overlooking the freshly rototilled yard, sketching his vision. He knew he would likely not live to see the blooms, but the act of planting was the redemption.
He was tilling the soil of his own conscience, uprooting the weeds of guilt and sowing intentions of reconciliation. Even as his mind began to wander, speaking to parents long gone as if they were standing beside him, the garden remained his anchor. Tom taught that forgiveness is not a feeling; it is a physics. It requires action, displacement, and the creation of space where once there was only clutter. By shaping the earth, he was shaping his legacy, leaving behind a living testament that said, “I was broken, but I sought to mend.” It was a reminder that as long as there is breath, there is the potential for revision.
Helen: The Totem of Faith
For Helen, the struggle was not with the past, but with the terrifying fragility of the future her family would face without her. Her anxiety was a palpable static in the room, exacerbated by hallucinations where she believed the police were shooting at her—a manifestation of her internal siege. She found her ground in the “Angel Stone,” a small, smooth rock she named Carol. To the clinical eye, this was a coping mechanism. To the spiritual eye, it was a totem—a physical manifestation of the metaphysical support she craved.
She would rub the stone, wearing down its surface with the friction of her prayers, talking to “Carol” about her children and grandchildren. In a world stripping her of all agency, that stone was a solid point of contact with the divine. It represented the “great cloud of witnesses” that surrounds us. Helen showed that faith often needs a tactile handle. When the mind is clouded by the hypoxia of dying and the fog of fear, the hand needs something to hold—a rock, a cross, a hand—to tether the soul to trust.
David: The Secret Language of Loss
Families on the edge of loss often develop their own secret language, a lexicon of hope and fear. With David, a sixty-year-old man dying of pancreatic cancer, this language took the form of a code. He was ready to die, his body exhausted from its long battle, but he couldn’t speak the words directly. To do so felt like a betrayal of his family, who were still locked in the desperate struggle to keep him alive. So he spoke in metaphors, in riddles. “I’m ready to go on the big trip,” he’d say. Or, “It’s time to cash in my ticket.” His family heard the words, but they couldn’t decipher their meaning. They clung to the literal, speaking of future vacations, of winning the lottery, of anything but the final journey he was trying to announce.
Sharon’s role became that of a translator, a bridge between David’s coded language and his family’s loving but uncomprehending hearts. Sharon sat with them, gently explaining that David’s “code” was his way of asking for permission to let go. He needed to know that they would be okay, that they could release him from his earthly struggle. It was a difficult, painful process. To accept his meaning was to accept his death. But with continued conversation, they began to understand. They saw that their desperate hope was becoming a burden to him, that their love was inadvertently holding him captive in a body that was failing.
The breakthrough came when his wife, her face streaked with tears, sat by his bedside and took his hand. “It’s okay, honey,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “You can go on your trip now. We’ll be alright.” A visible wave of relief washed over David. The tension in his body eased. He had been heard. He had been understood. He had been released. He died that night, peacefully, with his family by his side. They had finally broken the code, and in doing so, they had given him the greatest gift of all: a peaceful end to a life lived in love. Sharon’s role here was that of a translator, a frequency tuner. She helped the family understand that David was not losing his mind but communicating from a different plane of consciousness. By helping them “break the code,” she enabled them to tune into his frequency, to hear his messages of love and farewell.
Steven: The Energetic Storm
Similarly, the story of Steven, agitated and confused by his lung cancer, demonstrates how anxiety and fear can scramble the signal. His distress was not just a symptom; it was an energetic storm disrupting his transition. His son Ray, guided by Sharon, became an active participant in calming this storm. The administration of medication was the physical tool, but the act of a son caring for his father, of love being transmitted through touch and presence, was the energetic balm. Sharon’s education of Steven’s daughters was equally crucial. By explaining the process, she demystified it, transforming their fear into understanding and compassion. They shifted from being frightened bystanders to active participants in creating a field of peace around their father.
Martin: The Life Force Regulator
The dying process is an intricate dance between letting go and holding on, a negotiation between the patient’s will and the body’s limitations. Martin, an 84-year-old with pancreatic cancer, refused pain medication because he equated it with surrender. His desire to remain active, to continue his “doing,” was his way of asserting his life force. To the external observer, his refusal might seem stubborn, but from an energetic perspective, he was trying to keep his life force flowing at its usual intensity. Sharon’s challenge was to help him understand that managing his pain was not about giving up but about conserving his energy for what truly mattered.
The morphine pump, in this context, was not a symbol of defeat but a tool for efficiency. It was a life force regulator, designed to smooth out the painful spikes and allow Martin to use his remaining energy more purposefully. His eventual acceptance of more help and the use of the pump was not a surrender, but a re-channeling of his energy from fighting pain to being present with his family. His death, surrounded by loved ones, was a conscious, managed release, not a collapse.
Lena: The Sacred Act of Connection
Lena was a woman of fierce determination, her spirit a bright flame refusing to be dimmed by the failing of her body. At seventy-two, with pulmonary fibrosis stealing her breath, she had been forced to move into an assisted living facility, a transition she resented with every fiber of her being. She fought against her decline, pushing herself to remain active, to be productive, to deny the limitations her disease was imposing. But fear was her constant shadow. The sensation of not being able to breathe, the relentless gasping for air, created a constant state of anxiety. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” she would pray, the words of the Serenity Prayer a lifeline in a sea of panic.
Sharon’s visits with Lena were a delicate dance between addressing her physical symptoms and tending to the needs of her spirit. She talked about Lena’s fears, giving them voice and shape, which in itself seemed to lessen their power. She spoke of her family, of the love that bound them together, a force far stronger than any disease. As her body weakened, her spirit’s needs came into sharper focus. There was an old wound that needed tending, a friendship that had fractured years ago, leaving a lingering sense of incompleteness. “I need to talk to her,” Lena told Sharon one afternoon, a new urgency in her voice. “I need to make things right.”
This became her last wish, a final piece of “heart work” she needed to complete before she could find peace. With her family’s help, Sharon located her former friend. The phone call was a torrent of tears, forgiveness, and remembered love. It was a closing of a circle, a healing of a long-held ache in her soul. With this final task accomplished, a profound shift occurred in Lena. The fear that had held her captive began to recede, replaced by a deep sense of peace. She had accepted the things she could not change. Her family gathered around her, their presence a constant, loving vigil. She died with their hands in hers, her breath finally still, her spirit serene and complete.
Bert: The Beauty in the Debris
In the midst of decay, life often finds the most exquisite ways to express itself. Bert, at seventy-three, with a heart that was failing him, was a testament to this truth. He was the “Flower Man,” a title he had earned through his unique artistry. From the detritus of modern life—plastic bottles, colorful packaging, discarded odds and ends—he created vibrant, intricate flowers, each one a small miracle of transformation. Bert was a stubborn man, fiercely independent and resistant to help. When Sharon first began visiting him, he was guarded, his gruff exterior a shield against the vulnerability his illness forced upon him. But Sharon saw the beauty in his hands, in the way he could turn trash into treasure, and she knew that this was the key to his heart.
Sharon didn’t push or prod. She simply sat with him, admiring his creations, asking about his process. Sharon brought him interesting pieces of plastic she had found, a small offering to his art. Slowly, a rapport grew between them. He began to trust her, to allow her into the world he had built for himself, a world filled with color and beauty, a defiant celebration of life in the shadow of death. As his heart weakened, his body grew frail. The time came when he could no longer live alone. He was transferred to an inpatient hospice facility, a move he initially fought but eventually accepted. Even there, surrounded by the quiet hum of medical equipment, he continued to create, his fingers, though weak, still finding the familiar rhythm of his craft. His room became a garden of plastic blossoms, a testament to a spirit that refused to be extinguished. When he died, he was surrounded by his flowers, a field of color that spoke of a life lived with creativity, generosity, and a profound, unconventional beauty.
Paula: The Victory of Spirit
Sometimes, the greatest obstacle to a peaceful death is the medical system itself, which is designed to sustain biological function at the expense of spiritual peace. Paula, ravaged by stage 4 ovarian cancer, was initially trapped in a hospital environment that viewed her dying as a failure of protocol. The surgeon’s ultimatum—”walk and eat” or face more problems—was a profound misunderstanding of the dying process. He was trying to jump-start a circuit that was designed to power down. Sharon intervened, recognizing that the hospital was a place of resistance, and facilitated Paula’s return home.
Once home, Paula’s spirit expanded to fill the space left by her receding health. The family arranged for a walk along the beach using a specialized wheelchair. Paula had many answered requests: the request for a peanut butter sandwich, the sailing of her remote-controlled boat—these were not denials of her condition but joyful affirmations of life, lived fully until the last moment. Her refusal of a particular medication, based on her own nursing experience, was an assertion of her autonomy, her right to control her own energy. Her choice to briefly go off hospice for one last round of chemotherapy was part of this navigation, a final exploration of possibility before accepting the inevitable.
Paula was not a patient; she was a participant in the grandeur of creation. Later, she shared her vision of heaven—walking onto a cloud to meet the divine. This was not a hallucination born of pharmacology; it was a spiritual sighting. Paula looked through the veil of her suffering and saw not darkness, but a continuation of the light she found at the water’s edge. Her gratitude for that final trip was a testament to the power of the present moment. She squeezed the juice from the last fruit of her life, refusing to let the shadow of death eclipse the brightness of the now. When she finally passed, surrounded by the echoes of a “Live Well, Laugh Often, Love Much” motto, it was a victory of the spirit over the institution. And, for Sharon, a dear friend of Paula’s for many years, it was a heart felt transition into the Great Unknown for a most wonderful human being. We still miss her dearly.
Bea: The Sovereignty of Silence
The most profound existential questions often surface at the end of life. Bea, ninety-four and suffering from the weary cascade of chronic illness, articulated a sentiment society often finds uncomfortable: she was simply “done.” Her suffering was not primarily physical but existential—a soul-weariness, a recognition that her energetic contract with this plane was complete. She had signed a form refusing extra measures, yet the assisted living facility’s policy of mandatory 911 calls threatened to prolong a life she was ready to release.
The conflict highlights a fundamental clash between institutional protocols and individual sovereignty. The facility was programmed to preserve life at all costs, unable to compute the concept of a conscious, chosen death. Bea’s move to hospice was her final act of self-determination. By tapering her insulin, she was not committing suicide but removing the artificial props that forced her body to persist against its natural inclination. Her death three weeks later was not a failure of medicine, but the fulfillment of her deepest wish: a dignified exit. She taught us that honoring a soul’s frequency means listening to its signal, even—and perhaps especially—when it broadcasts a desire to go silent.
Jo and Myrtle: The Veils Thinning
Sometimes, the resistance to the threshold comes from the body’s own history of vitality. Jo, a Rose Festival Queen from sixty-five years prior, found the indignity of shortness of breath and swollen ankles to be a betrayal of her once-regal form. She stopped her medications, realizing that neither the pacemaker representative nor the hospice staff held the power to command death or prolong life indefinitely. She simply decided she was ready to go home, to the ultimate home, and in that decision, found her release.
Similarly, Myrtle, denied her final pleasures of gambling by a stroke, fought back with the only tools she had left. She scratched a nurse, a physical manifestation of her frustration, while hallucinating that her mother was right beside her. It was as if the veil between worlds had thinned to transparency; the mother she sought was more real to her than the nurse she fought. In her frothing and agitation, she was not merely dying; she was breaking through the membrane of this reality to reach the next.
Priscilla: Decoupling from the Avatar
Priscilla was a woman whose identity was intricately woven into the tapestry of her appearance—her perfectly coiffed hair, her memories of shopping at Macy’s, the phantom echoes of a Cadillac lifestyle. As her resources dwindled and her body failed, she clung to these external markers as if they were the coordinates of her selfhood. Her perfectly coiffed hair, maintained even as she slept sitting up to breathe, was a symbol of her enduring self. The conflict with her caregiver, Judy, regarding morphine was rooted in the fear of erasure. Judy worried that the medication would make Priscilla “sleep a lot more,” effectively deleting the vibrant, spunky friend she knew.
This is a common misunderstanding of the energetics of dying. As the body fails, it requires less metabolic fuel; the refusal of food is a natural shutting down, not a symptom to be fixed. Love and comfort become the more essential forms of nourishment. Sharon understood that the morphine was not an eraser, but a liberator—freeing Priscilla from the cage of pain so her spirit could rest. Even as she confused the past with the present, worrying for her cat “Baby,” Priscilla was navigating the difficult process of decoupling from the avatar she had spent a lifetime curating. Her request to remove her pain pump—”it takes up space and limits my breathing”—was a desire to shed the hardware of her suffering, to make room, physically and energetically, for the final expansion.
Tim: The Dress Rehearsal
Often, Sharon looked to the subconscious, where the soul often does its heavy lifting. Tim, a man consumed by lung cancer, began to speak of dreams. He dreamt of a bright, enveloping light, and of the sensation of being dead—not with horror, but with a strange, detached curiosity. These were not nightmares; they were rehearsals. The psyche, in its infinite wisdom, was acclimating him to the temperature of the afterlife. Tim’s dreams were the dress rehearsal for the final performance. They stripped away the fear of the unknown by making it familiar. He was practicing his exit. It reinforced my belief that we are guided, even in our sleep, toward the exit door. The light he saw was not a biological trick of the dying brain, but the beacon of the destination, pulsing through the walls of his slumber.
Joan: The Fortress of Denial
Some souls approach the precipice of death with a fierce refusal to look down. Joan was one of them. At forty-four, with end-stage lung cancer, she had built a fortress of denial around herself, and it was my duty not to breach its walls, but to stand guard outside them. Sharon arrived at the home she shared with her partner, Susanne, to find the air charged with anxiety. A recent visit from Joan’s family had left a toxic residue. They had recounted, in gruesome detail, the death of another relative from the same disease, painting a landscape of horror that Joan was now forced to imagine as her own. Their visit, meant as an act of connection, had become an act of cruelty, fueling the very fears she was trying so desperately to keep at bay.
Joan’s body bore the signs of imminent death; her temples were sunken, a subtle but certain indicator that her time was short. But her mind refused to accept what her body already knew. To challenge her denial would have been to strip her of her only defense, to leave her naked and trembling before the abyss. Instead, Sharon’s task was to honor it. She focused on her physical comfort, administering medication to quell the anxiety that fluttered in her chest and to ease the discomfort that was its constant companion. Sharon spoke to her not of dying, but of rest, of comfort, of this present moment.
That evening, as Sharon was leaving, Joan made a strange request. “Please, can you have two hospice workers come tomorrow?” she asked, her voice thin. “I need someone to be here for Susanne.” It was a moment of profound, if indirect, acknowledgment. She could not speak of her own death, but she could plan for her partner’s grief. She was looking beyond the veil, even as she denied its existence. The next morning, before the two hospice workers could arrive, Joan died. She slipped away quietly, her denial intact until the very end. Her final wish, a testament to her love for Susanne, had been a way of saying goodbye without ever having to utter the word. In honoring her denial, we had allowed her a death that was not a confrontation with terror, but a gentle, peaceful release, on her own terms.
Stella: The Moving Train
Stella, a woman with lung cancer, was “actively dying,” the voice on the phone said. The phrase is a clinical one, a sterile attempt to box in the wild, unpredictable nature of life’s end. Sharon was to admit her to hospice, a process that felt more like stepping onto a moving train than starting a journey from a quiet station. The disease, Sharon knew, already had its foot on the pedal. She found Stella’s family huddled in the living room, a fortress of denial against the encroaching reality. Her husband, his face a mask of determined optimism, spoke of new treatments, of fighting, of anything but the truth that was rattling the very foundations of their home. Her son, a mirror of his father’s hope, echoed the same sentiments. They saw hospice not as a support system, but as a surrender, a white flag waved in a battle they were not ready to lose.
Sharon’s role was not to shatter their fragile shield but to gently peel back its layers. She explained that hospice was a co-pilot, not the grim reaper at the controls. Hospice would journey alongside them, managing symptoms, offering comfort, and navigating the turbulent emotional currents. The immediate crisis was Stella’s breathing—a ragged, desperate fight for air that terrified her family and exhausted her frail body. In Stella’s room, the air was thick with the labor of her lungs. Sharon administered liquid morphine, a small act of mercy to ease the drowning sensation. As the medicine took hold, a fragile peace descended.
Stella’s deepest fear wasn’t about her own suffering, but about the unspoken words, the unresolved distances. Her daughter was out of town, a physical separation that amplified the emotional chasm. “I need to talk to her,” Stella whispered, her voice a mere thread of sound. Sharon dialed the number, placing the phone to Stella’s ear. What followed was a conversation stripped of all pretense, a raw and beautiful exchange of love and farewell. Tears streamed down Stella’s face, but they were tears of release, not of despair. The daughter on the other end, her voice choked with sorrow, found the courage to say goodbye. It was a sacrament of words, a final, holy communion across the miles.
Having found her peace, Stella drifted into a deep sleep. The family, witnessing the calm that had settled over her, finally began to let go. Their denial softened into a tender, sorrowful acceptance. They kept vigil through the night, their presence a silent blanket of love. Stella died the next morning, her final journey embarked upon not in fear, but in the gentle embrace of her family’s love and the peace of a heart made whole. Death, in its own time, had arrived not as an enemy, but as a quiet, inevitable guest.
Beyond the Threshold
Sharon and I posit that every being has a unique energetic signature, a specific spectrum of frequencies at which their life force resonates. As death approaches, these frequencies begin to shift. Sometimes, this shift is met with resistance not from the dying, but from their loved ones. Sharon, as the midwife of the soul, was also the spiritual equivalent of an electrician at the edge of our known universe, ensuring a smooth and graceful transfer of power as one precious light goes out, and sacred human energy returns to the cosmic whole.
In witnessing these lives—these unique traversals of the ultimate threshold—I am left with a singular, resounding truth. Death is not a failure of genetics, lifestyle, or medicine. It is the final, crowning achievement of a life fully lived. It is a process as active, as demanding, and as sacred as birth. Whether through the vibration of a harp, the petals of a rose, the planting of a garden, or the rubbing of a stone, the human spirit finds its way. We are all rivers trembling before the sea, but as Floyd and the others taught Sharon, and now, myself, the ocean is not the end. It is the beginning of a wholeness we can only imagine.
Sharon wrote the absolutely wonderful, emotional, and spiritually uplifting book “Whose Death is it Anyway, A Hospice Nurse Remembers” and had it published in 2014. These vignettes are all derived from that master work of the heart.
Whose birth was it anyway?
It was all of ours.
Whose death is it, anyway?
It is all of ours.
Be prepared for the 2nd most important day of life.
