Several women in my family have suggested that my posts have become morbid lately, excessively preoccupied with death. Is that true? And, if so, is it a problem?

After all, I have reached the age which is the average life span of an American male. It makes sense, does it not, that I keep an eye on the Grim Reaper. I'm not afraid of death. I've had a good life and I'm ready to go when the time comes. If I am apprehensive, it is not about death, but dying.

If I'm going to go, let it be quick, and not a long, drawn-out intervention of tubes and pills and rubber panties. Just put me in the boat and take me to Amold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead.

Böcklin was a Swiss artist who painted several hugely popular versions of the above painting, this one in 1883 (click to enlarge). A fantasy isle. An isle of hollowed-out granite, cupping a grove of cypress trees, in a silver lake. A vessel approaches a water gate, the landing place, bearing a coffin. We see hints of a cemetery under the trees.

I don't require Heaven. I can do without the Beatific Vision, an eternity of bliss, streets of gold, the company of saints. Put me in a box and take me to the Isle of the Dead. Stone. Xylem. Water. Wind whispering in the cypress trees. Ripples lapping the shore. Put me in one of those needlessly-linteled sepulchral hollows, groaning with the weight of feldspar and quartz. Not the Otherworld, but this world, this matter, this light, this glimmering embodiment of the real.