It is easy, fast, to fight and die beside your brothers in the sun. It is harder to build, to teach, to live, and to remember.

Life is a debt, of which death is our repayment.

Even fear faded, incipient mortality giving way to the kind of drawn-out academic detachment that rendered “certain death” as “incipient mortality.

A death may be a death, or early warning of existential threat or out-of-context problem. Nothing occurs in isolation. The world’s doom ripples back and forth through time.