Grave Expectations

The year is 1969, and I am a Senior at Hickory High School.  Our Honors English class is reading Dante's "Inferno" and I am apparently asking too many questions of the teacher because my friend, Tom,  continues sighing. Some exasperating sighs.  At one point, he just blurts out:  "SARA HILL!  YOU ARE OBSESSED WITH DEATH!"  This will become one of the defining moments of my life.  Thanks, Tom, for speaking your truth.  And for the inscription in my yearbook.  Forty-five years later, I am STILL obsessed with death.  After all, there is nothing which so intensifies life as the practice of remembering death.  Memento mori.  And here's to the hope that we all end up crossing the River Jordan and not the Styx!

Barbie and Mabel

Here is Pat, hard at work with the design of my shroud!  Can you see the MODELS she is using, to help explain to me how the shroud will work?!!  She found her Barbie at a thrift store and told me, "It was obvious from her purple lips, discolored legs, vacant stare, and general stiffness that she had departed this life, so I closed her eyes out of simple decency.  Mabel's demise was sudden and unexpected, but fortunate for me, as I needed a more zaftig model!!"