Washington Post Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote his last column on Sunday, he said goodbye to his readers, reporting that his cancer treatments had failed, and his doctors gave him  several weeks at most to live.

“My fight is over,” he wrote in a powerful goodbye. He thanked everyone who had supported him in his life – friends, family, doctors, readers – and wrote this last paragraph of farewell:

“I leave this life with no regrets,” he wrote. “It was a wonderful life – full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living. I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life I intended.”

I was struck by the simplicity of Krauhammer’s last column, there was no drama, but lots of feeling, gratitude, perspective and simple truth. I wanted to cry, but not in sadness, just emotion.

When I read it, I turned to Maria and said, “this is how I want to leave this world, this is how I want to feel, this is how I want to die.”

This is not a morbid thought for me, I have seen a lot of death and suffering in my life, as a reporter and volunteer, and I know that the people who think about how they want to leave the world have the best chance of getting their wish. I see people almost every day in my life who are trapped by death, say they never expected it,  and soon no longer have any way of control or shaping it.

Death is our universal experience, the great leveler, the fate of billionaires and paupers, the left and the right,  people we love, neighbors and strangers. It binds us together as humans more than any other thing. It is worth talking about, it is just as important as money and political power.

It is the great irony that we hide from it and can’t bear to see it, yet none of us will avoid it.

A hospice social worker told me once that the people who have the best deaths are those that don’t leave it to God, but take care of it themselves. “The Lord isn’t into details,” she said. “He’s given us brains. You have to think and plan carefully and spell out what you want, from going to the bathroom to where your bed is to the flowers by your bedside, to the people you let get close to you and listen to and make decisions for you.”

There are no miracles at the edge of life, she told me, only the chance of dignity and peace. That is the goal. There is nothing else to offer.

I understand that many of us do not really get to plan our deaths. Death doesn’t much care how we wish to die, it has its own ideas about it. Death can come suddenly or quickly, expectedly, or as a complete surprise to many.

In our country, we seem perpetually stunned by death, perhaps this is Mother Nature’s way of keeping us from worrying about it.

A friend told me the other day that she couldn’t believe that her mother and father died some years ago, it was a complete shock to her and she never got over it, and mourns them almost every day. But I am troubled by this and puzzled.

All of our mothers and fathers will die, and so will our sisters and brothers and us. We go on, we let go, that is what we do, those of us who wish to live our intended lives.

I confess I felt heartless, and I struggled to empathize. I couldn’t find the pity in my heart. Did she really think, I wanted to ask, that they would live forever to make her feel more secure?

The real question is not if, but how and  when, and how can we help give the people we love “good deaths,” something our culture does not much talk about or worry about? You will not see it on their news.

“There’s no escaping the tragedy of life,” wrote Awul Gawande in his wonderful book Being Mortal,  “which is that we are all aging from the day we are born. One may even come to understand and accept this fact.”

Sad, but not only sad.

There are, I have learned, many things worse than death.

In hospice, I remember Walter, who summoned family and doctors, and me, a hospice volunteer, to his home and opened a two-hour conversation about how he wished to die – what kind of medicine he would take, where he wished to be, how many people he cared to talk to, how much treatment he wished to receive, how he imagined his last days must be..

When everyone was on the same page, the meeting was over. The doctors and nurses seemed relieved to me, they didn’t have to guess what he wanted. They all told me as we left that usually, they have no idea. Nobody wants to talk about it..

Walter got the death he wanted, it was peaceful and beautiful and quick. He had made it clear he was not to go to a nursing  home, undergo extreme surgical procedures, take most kinds of medicine, be kept alive by artificial means, or listen to people who told  him to fight. He signed a legal document detailing his wishes, he did not wish to take years to die, but  weeks or even days.

It was not a battle, he said to the doctors, it was not a fight, it was his death, and he wanted to be sure he could leave the world the way he wished. He did not wish to die fighting. Courage, he said, was not in prolonging his life but in being brave enough to think about dying  well.

I think of him often.

The social workers all say the same thing. The more people think about it and talk about, the better they will fare.

I would like to leave the world much as Krauthammer wrote about it in his column. Quietly and in peace, in the company of people I love, family and special friends, which means a small group of people. Grateful for life, accepting death.  I hope to share the  process of dying through my writing, as I share my life, if I can, but I don’t wish to give it away to others.

What I most need, I know, is inside of me.

Some things must be private, if they are to live and breathe.

“Find a place inside where there’s joy,” wrote Joseph Campbell, ” and the joy will burn out the pain.”

Death is the most personal thing in the world, mine is mine.

The dialogue I wish to have is with myself, and perhaps the people who read my writing and to whom I owe much of my good life. Maria and I know one another better than any other person has ever known either of us.

We will each know what to do, when the day comes. And we do talk about it, amidst all the fun we have. I wish when I leave the world to be surrounded by people who will help me to die, not pressure me to live. That is love to me.

Love is more powerful than death, that is my faith.

At that point, my fight will be over, I hope.

I will have nothing to prove, nothing to apologize for, nothing to regret.

I hope I will be able to say that I have done the best with life that I could, as most people do. To the awakened mind, wrote  J.K. Rowling, death is but the next great adventure.

The more it is feared and avoided, I believe,  the harder it will be.

While I have struggled and taken many bad and difficult turns, I have  lived the life I intended. And will continue to do so, until my final breath.

That is the miracle of a good life.

Up to now, it has been a wonderful life, full and complete with great loves and disappointments and successes and failures and the great risks, journeys and endeavors that make life worth living.

I am sad when I think of leaving Maria and my dogs and daughter and friends, I am 71, I love my life more than ever, but I am not blind, and the shadows grow. It is time to begin thinking about it and talking about it, and once in awhile, writing about it.

I don’t wish to be stunned by it or hide from it. It is as much a part of life as the air we breathe and the sun that shines on us.

I hope it is a time of love for me. Love never dies a natural death,  wrote the poet Anais Nin. “It dies because we don’t know  how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and  betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings and tarnishings.”

Love, I think, dies in the darkness.

Mark Twain wrote that a person who lives fully is prepared to die at any time, and he or she asks that of the people who love them, that they also be prepared for the ones they love to die.

I think that’s what I want to say when I die, that’s how I want to feel.