People have an amazing ability to think of everything as a story. They isolate certain events or periods in their lives and turn them into stories. Thus everyone hears, every Christmas, about the time Aunt Mabel went to the corner store for a loaf of bread. For the sake of a story there must be a willingness to allow certain details to be ignored, such as why Aunt Mabel needed the bread in the first place, or what she did with it after she returned. The important thing to the listeners is what happened at the corner store.
Unfortunately life can't be divided up into these little segments. It is not in the least bit episodic. If you tell life as a story, it must be an indivisible epic. Aunt Mabel went to the corner store not because she wanted toast but because she had always had an obsessive subconscious need to reenact scenes from her childhood. But you wouldn't know that unless you saw, thirty years ago, Little May walk to the corner store in the rain and get splashed by a bus. You don't see the bigger picture because you want to hear about when she got hit on by Arlo Guthrie.
Here is the bigger picture. Aunt Mabel bounced you in her lap before you were a month old. She bought you your first ice cream cone at the aforementioned corner store. A few years later, Aunt Mabel died in her sleep.
How depressing, you must be thinking, and how fortunate for you that you don't actually have an Aunt Mabel. Well, some people aren't so lucky. They have to come to terms with her death. How do they do that? They tell stories at the funeral. It's a vicious circle, I tell you.
The stories at the funeral are all about Mabel Full of Life. They cheerily reminisce about her love and good cheer. They don't shy away from her faults, her light fingers and questionable meetings on street corners, but they dismiss them as inconsequential in the larger sense. They comfort and they provide closure. The stories at the funeral all end with "and then she died." It isn't spoken out loud, but it's there as the hidden subtext to every giggle, every smile of remembrance. Although people are troubled by it, they intuitively understand its necessity.
This isn't to say that death is an unmixed blessing. It is natural to pity those people who miss out on their childhood, or their teenage years, or their adult life, even those who miss out on their senescence. They miss out on the full range of human experience. When death comes before the story has run its course, it is a tragedy. Just as it is nearly impossible to judge an unfinished book, it is very difficult to understand an unfinished life. But death at the proper time is fitting.
There is nothing wrong with this tendency to turn lives into stories. It is how we ascribe meaning to our existence, and to our dear ones. When we are caught up in a narrative about Aunt Mabel, we honor her. After all, legends are merely those people who are as alive through their stories as they ever were when they still drew breath.
I want my story to end well. Not "and he lived happily ever after" but "and he died peacefully, in the arms of those he loved." One feels incomplete and unbelievable, the stuff of fantasy. The other carries a hint of perfection.
So, irrationally, I do not fear death. I embrace it. I will be ready for the conclusion of my story, and I hope it will have been a good one.