I had never looked closely for a long period at a dying person. I had never listened to the strained breathing of a body barely functioning and had never put my head beside a man too weak to speak, smelled his pungent breath and silently shared his day in, day out view of the white popcorn ceiling. It was when I put the camera down and became present that I could feel my fears melting away.

With this deeper but calm proximity to death’s physical attributes, I contemplated my parents’ current and serious health concerns, as well as my own mortality. My consciousness became richer for it. As I would leave John’s bedside to return to my wife and son, I was positively euphoric, as when walking away from a therapist’s office or standing on a cliff. In the few hours after he died, on Jan. 9, 2013, before the people from the funeral home came, we stood around him and observed the changes to his body. We saw the sinking of cheeks and eyes and the revealing of the neck bones. We saw the way his forehead remained warm after his limbs had grown cold. We talked about death, and I took some photos and we teased the man who was now gone and we laughed, too. Gradually, his mouth was pulled into the cheeky smile that we knew so well.

We could use news of a good death. Not a tragic death or a famous death, just a good one, the kind that might happen to any of us if we are lucky.