WHAT BECAME A LIFE-LONG REFLECTION began on the day a group of us attending a conference on hospice care were chatting during a break. The year was 1979 when books like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying and the Hospice movement were causing folks in the States to reevaluate attitudes about death and care for the dying. I was on the panel in my capacity as Chairman of the Education Committee of Chittenden Hospice in Burlington, Vermont. As we stood in a sunny patch away from the chill of the shade on an April day, my wife, Lucy, shared a story about our son, Jeremy, when he was six years old. While walking back from school he witnessed a group of boys tormenting a frog until it died whereupon they threw its body into a ravine. When he got home he asked Lucy, “Mummy, how do you bury a frog?” The panel of us “experts” had had plenty to say that morning about death and dying, but Jeremy’s question left us speechless until someone said, “That would be a good idea for a book.”