are you sure about that?

    Noah has been preoccupied with death for as long as he can recall. When he was 8 years old, he read the obituary section of the newspaper daily, studying each line. “I wonder who this person was,” he would say, as he tried to share his interest with his mother. But she would shrug and mumble, “You can never really know.” Noah wanted to know; he needed to know. He was searching, investigating. Who had these dead people been? Whom had they left behind? How old were they when they died and what had killed them? Could Noah die? Could his parents? Decades later, Noah starts his psychoanalysis with what he calls his “obsession with dead people.” He wants to know everything about these people in the obituaries, and I want to know everything about him. With each obituary that Noah brings in to the consulting room, we piece together our respective puzzles, hunting for the missing pieces to complete our pictures. “I got it,” Noah reports after hours of painstaking researc...