I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

There are so many things to fear.

Spiders, snakes, heights, deep water, the dark.

I have a friend who is so fearful of rats, you can't even say the word in her presence. I'd say that most

of these fears are rational. Snakes and spiders can bite, and some are venomous. You could drown in

deep water or fall from a great height. The one thing that humans

seem almost universally afraid of is also the only part of life that is certain. Death. Of course that's something we fear as mortal creatures.

Our lives are understandably precious to us,

and we don't know how long we can keep them.

Of course that causes anxiety.

But as we see in today's poem,

not everyone approaches the end of their life with fear.

This is a poem by Colin Pope.

You're supposed to enjoy dying.

Have you heard of this?

An octogenarian, nasal cannula and wheeled oxygen,

explains to me he's ready and eager, exhausted by consciousness.

He's shuffling down the trapezoids of light at the hospice where my sister works,

where I've come with her tuna sub pretzel chips.

What's that like? I ask him, as I lean up against an unmanned nurses' station.

I'm considering Katie's mother here, how it was described to me that around her breathing tube she mouthed what looked like the words help me moments before her death from a ruptured heart valve a failed bypass it's like waiting

for anything else he he tells me, the doctor, post office,

...