The people who are still with me

For this column, I am introducing another of my sayings I find myself telling people all the time:

“It is a historical fact, nobody has beaten death.”

Whether the words are original from my mind or not, the meaning of it is pretty accurate.

Writing a column on death is intimidating and all week long, I agonized on how to approach the subject. The reason I decided to attempt even trying was that the beginning of the year had me reading obituaries of about a half dozen people with whom I have had some sort of contact. When relatives came in to the Sun’s office to take care of the business of put...