I read this story many years ago and found it depressing and slow at first. But it was stuck in my mind for a long time. The lenses of death or impending death to allow someone a new perspective on life, on living was something that I kept revisiting.

As people I knew, loved like grandparents and parents — have now passed, I kept reflecting on the power of this story.

But a lately recent reading revealed more to me. The niceties of society, the masks of amicability, the routine, the devastation of being unheard and unseen is so obvious. That the only person Ivan Ilyich connects with is someone who is compassionate and has no illusions of Ivan’s frailty and mortality.

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