None of us can definitively say what happens in the mind during the milliseconds before death, or the milliseconds after. Of course, every religion has a theory: heaven, hell, rebirth. We have the accounts of those who have died for a short time and been revived, descriptions of light at the end of a tunnel, or the entirety of a life flashing by.

We have all wondered and worried about the final seconds before, and the final seconds after. Samuel Beckett and I intimately share these same questions. Rockaby was his response to the solitary death of his grandmother, and my response to the death of my aunt, who passed recently surrounded by her friends and family. We must learn to embrace the beauty and wonder in both life and death if we are to survive this world unbroken.