"Knowing that a death is coming doesn't make it any easier to bear when it arrives," a friend of mine told me. "It just makes it a different kind of unbearable."

I don't know if that's true. I think that there are no truisms when it comes to death.

A woman who lost her mother in the September 11 attacks was angrily indignant at the idea that the anniversary of the day was worse in any way than any other day. "She's gone every day," she told a reporter.

And yet my sister finds two months of the year harder to bear than any others: the month of her daughter's birthday, and the month that brought her death.

For my own part, I have to wait for more experience to truly be able to disagree with my friend. The deaths that have come my way have so far followed in the implacable footsteps of incurable illness. Three were also bound up in old age.

Is it cold of me - am I the only one who begins to feel a quiet dread when a friend or relation passes what I will vaguely call a certain age?

Not dread, exactly. Rather that certainty that classical painters insisted on keeping always before our eyes. Remember that the next time you visit a museum and see skulls and insects and watches and pomegranates scattered across a canvas. Remember what they're supposed to be saying.

Memento mori. Remember you must die.

But first you'll watch others go.

Will their footsteps smooth your own path, or roughen and confuse it?

As my grandparents and the elderly neighbor who was a grandparent to everyone lucky enough to know him began to falter and deliberate, that phrase was never far from me. Memento mori.

Horrible as it was, I did appreciate the warning.

I took a job, when I was seventeen, in a home for severely handicapped children. One of them had been marked out for early death long before he was born. His condition was so rare and so thoroughly bound up in mortality that the idea of a cure was unthinkable.

One child similarly afflicted lived five whole years. All the rest - mercifully few of them - died between their first and second birthdays.

I arrived in his life, or he came into mine, just before he turned one. I read his file. I heard what the others who worked there knew about his life and unquestionable death.

I spent every minute I could with him, on duty and off. I carried him about with me. He never grew bigger than a very portable bundle.

I didn't waste time railing or hoping. There was no point, no hope. There was only each day spent the way we're told to spend our days - as if they'll be our last.

I was patient as I've never been able to be patient with anyone else. I was kind and, yes, I was happy. Because I would so soon lose him, he belonged to me in a way no one else ever would.

And then he was gone, and I'd been warned. And yes, it made it easier.

But that's just me. As I've said, my experience has been limited.

Some day no doubt I'll have the jolt of the unexpected, and then I'll be able to compare. And if that friend is still alive to hear me, I'll tell him if he was right.

Learn more about this author, Deborah Markus.
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