In this volume, Death now sneaks up on our hero, making two appearances, halfway through and at the end. This week, I finished the third volume of “In Search of Lost Time,” which brings us halfway through the entire work. And, here we are, wasting a third of our life sleeping and probably more than that in futile and stupid pursuits and distractions. That our family members have to die, that our friends have to die, that the entire world will cease to exist for all of us, likely long before we’ve prepared. They assured us she would be fine and asked her favorite grandson to convince her to have surgery she was scared, but I did as they asked, and convinced her to undergo the surgery during which she died. As it was, she was also a bit of a hypochondriac and on one of the occasions that she called for an ambulance for a free ride to the hospital, she was unlucky: her arteries were mostly blocked there would need to be open-heart surgery. If you had told me as a young man that she would die one day, or that it would be before all of my other elderly relatives, I would called you a liar. Grandma was the sort of little old lady who chats up and hugs strangers in the grocery store and says blithely inappropriate things.

My grandparents effectively raised me- I was born into their small-town world, which seems as distant now as King Arthur’s court, and remain there in my heart. I think the first time I really struggled with the inescapability of death was when my grandmother left us 14 years ago, when we were unprepared. Without keeping this in mind, we tend to get lost in the manifold of experience maybe the monks were trying to remind each other that time is short and it’s later than you think.

Like an uninvited guest at every party, death lurks in the background of all human stories, intruding at unexpected and inappropriate moments to ruin our future plans and cut short our fun. Traditionally, Trappist monks would greet one another with the cheerful reminder:

Proust the guermantes way