(Note: I am neither dying nor planning to die. This is a just-in-case notification. Also, I wrote this ... like ... 15 years ago or so. I'm mostly going to leave it as originally written with some updates. I'll color and bold the updates.) There's been a lot of death around me of late. I don't know if it's just coincidental or if, because I'm getting older, people that I know seem to be dying more frequently. In the school where I teach, there's been at least four deaths of close family members within the last three months. In the time since I originally wrote this, my mother has died and an increasingly disturbing amount of family members. I'm now 50 so ... yeah. Recently, I sang at the funeral for a stillborn baby. It was ... surreal. There were pictures of the family with the baby and the baby himself. It reminded me of the once popular practice of "Death Portraits" or "Post-mortem Photography." The funeral was pretty ...