"Death confronts us with the fragility of life. Early in Albert Camus' The Plague, following one of the first deaths, the narrator remarks, “The perplexity of the early days gradually gave place to panic… And it was then that fear, and with fear serious reflection, began”2. This is all the more poignant when we confront the bitter absurdity of unnatural, premature death. The horror of mass death produced by our own sociopolitical arrangements, moreover, converts this existential absurdity into an unfathomable travesty of human fallibility and hubris, if not sheer cruelty. ..."

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