Not as intolerable as being dead, in my opinion, but I'm very fond of me. I would miss me a lot.

When you live with a potentially life-threatening condition you get used to the thought of dying. You accept it, you push on. The thing that scared me was the picture of dying slowly and painfully, the loss of independence and identity to illness.

Adrien, people get killed all the time. Since when is it your job to find out what happened to them?" "I'm not usually suspected of murdering them." "You have been as long as I've known you.

How did people get over this? They obviously did. Every day someone fell in love with the wrong person and had to pack up all their fragile, misguided hopes and unwanted affection, and move on to the next picnic table.

I didn't approve of murder on general principles. Not even of people who seemed to go around begging for it.

I thought of the words of the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne. "If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

He needed fresh air and sunshine. A walk in the woods and afterward a good book to read by the fire. Yeah, that was the life.