“It’s your ȷob to die, Grandad”

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book The Signature of All Things a young woman is greatly distressed because her maid’s grandmother has died.1 The young woman had never met the grandmother. She looks to a woman in late middle age for help, and this is what she hears:“What a great heap of nonsense…At my age, can you begin to imagine how many people’s grandmothers I have seen die? What if I had wept over each one of them? A grandmother’s death does not constitute a tragedy, child—and somebody else’s grandmother’s death from three years past most certainly should not bring on a fit of weeping. Grandmothers die, child. It is the proper way of things. One could nearly argue that it is the role of a grandmother to die…”I have recently received two missives related to death. One friend thinks it “sad and unfair” that his 70-year-old friend died quickly of pancreatic…
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