In some sense our culture’s fierce resistance to the bleak inevitable is understandable. Who is eager to experience the fear and impatience of bored relatives huddled together in the face of what one day they, too, will confront? Instead we get television episodes that mask finality, even while pretending to confront it, and films that gloss the ends of our lives with gold dust and perfume, giving us a finale as flimsy, fantastical, absurd, and gorgeous as their dewy-eyed stars. We watch these fictions so we won’t have to think too much about death and, like Tolstoy’s Levin, we tell ourselves, “So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work — anything so as not to think of death!