Caring for my dying father, and then my dying mother, taught me that death has certain patterns built into it-and that death is not what I thought it was. Just as a woman laboring to birth a soul into this world goes through predictable stages, so too does a body laboring to birth a soul into the next. While the stages of birth or death have predictable patterns, there is never a predictable story. You may linger in one stage of labor, almost slip past another, plateau for an indeterminate amount of time, and finally deliver a soul. As a hospice nurse, I have witnessed every combination of...