A friend was bit by a rattlesnake back in the 1980s while hiking in the Arizona mountains where access to a phone for an emergency call would require hours of her friend’s fast hiking down the mountain. She would lie there for hours before the helicopter landed to take her to the hospital. 

Telling me about it many years later, she did not mention the pain, but instead described almost dreamily how she lay there alone on a slab of rock in the warm spring sun, facing death – and was overwhelmed by a sense of love.

She said she fell in love with the rock on which she lay.

What a wonderful way to go.