In America, Ann Neumann writes in “The Good Death,” “death has been put off and professionalized to the point where we no longer have to dirty our hands with it.” But with the coronavirus, death has drawn too near to ignore. And this is a good thing. The dying, their value and their particular wisdom should never have been banished from our common life in the first place.

The physicians who accompany people as they face death have a unique perspective on mortality, perhaps thanks to the example of their remarkable patients. I spoke to Christopher D. Landry, a postgraduate trainee in the Columbia University psychiatry department, last month, during his emergency medicine rotation. “A lot of young people feel that life in the shadow of death is no life at all,” Dr. Landry said. “But everybody approaches that shadow eventually. And then, even people who were previously young and healthy learn to appreciate the many good things in life that they’re still able to have.”

The prospect of death also prompts a philosophical evaluation of life. These reckonings can bring the blur of ordinary life into sharp and brilliant focus.

At 19, Ms. Smietana lost her mother, and later, her older sister. From that point on, her family consisted of herself and her father, a stoic and steadfast garbage man who worked for the city of Chicago for some 30 years. Ms. Smietana told me that she had always been close with her father, but that their relationship became even more vital after the loss of her sister and mother. “That’s made this whole situation a little more intense,” she said.