My father, an air-conditioning engineer, worried about the details of his demise, like a cat with a cockroach, for a decade before he died. He once wrote cryptically to a friend in Hyderabad: “What should be the temperature of a vehicle in which a person could travel from one world into another?”

We all have a ticket for that journey. Some depart sooner than others, while some go quickly, dispatched by a car with a drunk driver or a truck out of nowhere. They are fortunate. However, our hearts belong to those condemned to a creeping death through dementia, slow cancer, or some debilitating progressive disorder that will rob them of dignity and self-respect but not let them go.