Everyone knows that they’re going to die eventually, but most of the time we try really hard not to think about it. When we do think about it, we do things like eat more cookies and go shopping. But disease often forces us to confront our mortality. In portraits of the dying, the artist spoke with hospice patients, people who knew they were going to die and photographed them before and shortly after their deaths (via 3QD). In the Guardian, Susan Sontag’s son describes her attitude towards death (also via 3QD)

But no amount of familiarity could lessen the degree to which the idea of death was unbearable to her. In her eyes, mortality seemed as unjust as murder. Subjectively, there was simply no way she could ever accept it. I do not think this was denial in the ‘psychobabble’, Kübler-Ross sense. My mother was not insane; she knew perfectly well that she was going to die. It was just that she could never reconcile herself to the thought.

This guy hopping rocks in the Grand Canyon seems pretty comfortable with his mortality, though (3QD again).