Mortality Meditations

How has a personal loss shaped your view of life?

Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich is one of literature’s most unflinching portraits of dying. What makes Ivan’s death “bad”—pain, denial, social falsity, class? What does dying reveal about the life that preceded it?

Anne Boyer’s The Undying exposes the economics of dying in contemporary America. Susan Sontag examines how metaphors shape—and distort—our experience of illness. How does Boyer expose the economics of dying? What do metaphors do to—and for—the experience of illness?