«We must get used to celebrating with "the foreigner" that is in us, grateful with that gratitude of the blessing of the olive - as Marcus Aurelius wrote in ancient times - which, falling on the ground, thanks the tree that produced it» . 

The scholar André Malraux, alongside the ancient blessing of Marcus Aurelius, wrote that «the thought of death is the thought that makes us men. We should celebrate the day on which, for the first time, we reflected on death, because that is the day that marks the transition to maturity. Man was born when, for the first time, he murmured in front of a corpse: "Why?" This "why" like a ray of red light runs through the time of humanity from the day of Abel's death. 

A person who spent her life studying the experiences of terminally ill patients in the concreteness of accompaniment was Elisabeth Kübler Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist who moved to Chicago to dedicate herself, with a special team, to the study of the behavior of dying. Elisabeth Kübler Ross was not content to write based on hearsay, but she wanted to experiment by also involving her family in this tiring journey towards the ford of life. She recounted this singular experience, made within her family in relation to the education of her children. «There came a moment in my life - reports the famous psychiatrist - in which I realized that I had brought two children into the world, that I had given them well-being, an education, an education; but my children were empty, empty like a can of beer already drunk. I then told myself that I had to do something for them that wasn't just material. So, in agreement with my husband, we took a guest into our house: an old man of seventy-four, who the doctors had diagnosed as having no more than two months to live. I wanted my children to be close to him on his journey towards death, I wanted them to see, to touch the most important experience in a man's life. The guest stayed with us not two months, but two and a half years, welcomed in every way like a member of the family. Well: that experience brought my children incredible spiritual wealth, those thirty months matured them extraordinarily. In that unknown brother who came to die among them young and healthy, my children discovered a new meaning for their lives; they have truly become adults. it is he, that poor old man, who has given us a priceless gift; not us to him, who also looked after him and assisted him with all the love we were capable of." In our society we witness the removal of old people from their homes so as not to see them die, to hide the reality of death from young people.

Man - let us not forget - does not need to hide death, but to face it in order to understand life also in the light of faith with that hope that Jesus has lit on the horizon of our life.

On the following page we read Pope Francis who helps us invoke a triple grace from God: dying surrounded by family members, dying in the Church, a community of Christians, dying aware of our fragility but trusting in divine mercy.