“My great-grandmother always taught us that you should die healthy ‘so you can party on the other side.’ She didn’t really believe that you had to be sick to die. She didn’t connect sickness and death. For her, death was like your time is up, and sickness is just something you may have to go through.
“In her mid-nineties, and in good health. It’s funny story: one evening she told everyone that she was going to die that night. And she said, ‘It’s my time. My time i sup.’ Then my mother who was trying very hard to be modern, said, ‘Nonsense, you’re very healthy.’ ‘That has nothing to do with dying,’ my great-grandmother replied. And in the morning, she was dead.”
–Lewis Mehl-Madrona in The Myth of Normal