And I always know that whatever I send to you will be going to the best of homes. It helps to make up for the times when things don’t work out despite my best efforts and intentions. Thank you for that.

I’ve had very close experiences with death. I’ve seen someone die in a nursing home, lost a childhood playmate to the war in Iraq, and also my grandfather who helped raise me (though his was inevitable old age). When I worked at a small family veterinary clinic at age 15, I assisted in euthanasias, and carried their corpses–some of which were dogs that weighed almost as much as me–to the freezers in the back. Later, when working at wildlife centers, I had to kill food animals using nothing but my two hands, and to scrape off the road–even kill, other animals.

My Patron and Father is not only a Death-god, but a god of Warriors and War, the orphaned and the marginalized. My views on Death are very different, I think, from a lot of people out there. Death is not solitary, it’s simply another form that the energies of Life take. Nothing ever stops, it only flows, and transforms. I am profoundly respectful of this process (or, I struggle very hard to be based on experience and learning from my Patron, as I am an imperfect being), even if I may seem cold and mechanical, even irreverent about it at times. This Gallows humor or surface-irreverance is sometimes the only thing that keeps me sane.

You can rest assured, Lupa, that anything I have acquired from you will be treated with the dignity and respect it deserves. I wish I could say the same to everyone who comes to people like us, or even others like us who probably have a lot more still to learn (though in the end, we all do now, don’t we?)