dwelling on the last few moments of their existence, especially if those minutes are to be filled with pain or indignity. But Nuland's descriptions of, for example, what happens to the body when an individual has a heart attack, are oddly reassuring.
One of the most important points that Nuland seems interested in making is that the body is a miraculous thing. Most people who have enjoyed good health or even relatively good health for most of their lives tend not to pay too much attention to the functioning of their bodies until something does go wrong, a fact that tends to make us all the more fearful of our bodies. But Nuland will not let us get away with such ignorance about our own bodies, about the miraculous processes that take place inside the universe that is our own physical form. In using the biological process of death to mak
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