This column could have been titled “Thoughts on death and dying,” but that would have been a bit morbid.

That just wouldn’t be a good way to start the morning for many of my readers, especially since I suspect most of them — of you — of us — are a bit “age advanced.”

Now, isn’t that a clever euphemism for “old”?

“End-of-life” is a bit, well, softer. Yet, it still connotes passing from this life, this world, to, well, to somewhere.

The inevitability of the experience is undeniable. Exactly what comes next, or what we think or hope comes next, is life’s greatest mystery, and one that each person must approach in his or her own way.

Something I would never do is tell someone that her or his belief — whatever it may be — is wrong. This I couldn’t let myself do, regardless of my own perspective.

I do know, however, that the passing of someone whom I know, or have known somewhere along my own journey — and for whom I care, or have good memories about — truly touches me somewhere in my inner core of sensitivity. I do not regard their “leaving” lightly. I feel a loss, and also an awareness of the temporary nature of this gift called life. There’s a beginning. There’s an ending. At least this is so for our pilgrimage here on earth.

Death, then, is surely the great equalizer. You might call it an equal opportunity event.

Call it what you will, but the playwright Robert Bolt put it so eloquently in his classic “A Man for All Seasons” when he has Sir Thomas More say:

“Death comes for us all. Even at our birth — even at our birth — it does but stand aside a little, and muses to itself whether it will draw nigh that day or the next. It is the law of nature, and the will of God.”

Indeed.

APROPOS — “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.”

— John Donne

(1624)