“Pandemic or not, I will still lie awake each night with the persistent and unpleasant thoughts of my certain death, but I will choose not to smother this existential dread or anxiety. Instead, I want to explore it, befriend it. I have learned that the only way to conquer the darkness is to venture through it,”

For many, Covid-19 was the rude awakening that death was not a long-distance relationship so much as a close neighbor.

For Becker this is literally true: what we regard as normality is our collective, protective madness, in which we repress the grim truth about the human condition.