I would like to start off this newsletter with a light, casual conversation about death. Go with me here.

As a child, my first memory of having a nightmare was when, at age 5 or 6, I dreamed that I died. My dream brain was apparently a little fuzzy on how death actually worked, and so what happened was that I lay down in the flower bed in front of my house at the time and was carried up in the air in it, to eventually be deposited on the roof, where I died. The actual death process wasn't made clear, but I had a disembodied voice who narrated many of my dreams and it said, just before I woke up, "And there she died," which clued me in to what had happened to me.