Willa Cather Letter on Death

“It’s a brutal fact, Zoe, that after one is 45, it simply rains death, all about one, and after you’ve passed fifty, the storm grows fiercer. I never open the morning paper without seeing the death of someone I used to know, East or West, staring me in the face. And in the days when I first knew you, people didn’t use to die at all; all the obituary page never had the slightest connection with our personal life. Death just becomes a deep, be-numbing fact in one’s life long before it ends one.”
–letter to Zoe Akins, Nov. 21, 1932

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