It’s important to have death myths . It gives one time to prepare oneself for the inevitable. I want to live and die well. I would like to die in our bedroom, here or there, comfortably in bed, under my own quilt and on my own pillow. Here, in India, the bedroom is full of windows looking out on a wall of green past the lovely deodar tree, past the stream that is our constant presence and companion for six summer months; there, our bedroom is a perch that opens to a vast vista of the sky over the Pacific Ocean. Will the universe grant this? Or will I be rushed to a hospital and die in a hospital bed with unfamiliar faces all around me, like my dad died? Of course, one doesn’t know. I wouldn’t like to die the way Louis Kahn, the famous architect died, in between his two families, in a railway station.  

I have never been one to think about the future. It has simply happened to me, and happened better than I could ever have imagined it to be. But suddenly these days I find myself thinking and wondering about the mystery of the future. Who will go first, Payson or me? Where will our death/deaths take place? Here, in India, or in the US? Or in-between, blown up in a plane? Together? The scenarios are infinite, and no matter how many of them I can think of now, then is will be entirely new and and the circumstances, unexpected.