By David Warren.

There is a joke I remembered from my senior childhood, itself a large number of years ago: "I want to die in peace and tranquility, like my grandfather. Not screaming and panicking, like his passengers."

Well, my own maternal grandpa was a railway engineer, or as we say today "a train driver." I hasten to point out that he did not die in a train wreck, though some did on the Sydney and Louisburg Railroad, though few, because its passengers were mostly humble lumps of coal.

I remembered this joke when I was myself being wheeled into surgery, from a heart attack with all the trimmings, four years ago (to the day). This was my way of planning for a good death, or at least as good as possible.

By an extraordinary coincidence, my Nova Scotia buddy, the poet Fraser Sutherland, was being wheeled in a gurney the other way along the same hospital corridor. He had also had a heart attack, but it was not his first, and he did not survive it.

In a peculiar sense, I deem Fraser my "secular" guide to death, a kind of "Canadian Book of the Dead." (He was a sincere Quaker, and a courageous one, who had recently endured the loss of his whole family.) May he rest in peace.

Death, for modern man, comes usually by surprise, for we have received no preparation from "happy clappy" Church figures, who avoid what they see as morbidity. Even when the doctors have given us formal warning, and death comes with or without bells clanging, it comes suddenly even when it is smooth.

But there are also good priests, and traditional churches, and even though the Church may appear to be passing through a spiritual vacuum, there are ten-thousands of them and they can't all be utterly broken. Among such company one may speak of "a good death," and find people who won't be offended, because they know what you mean.

My own first acquaintance with this phrase came not from personal experience but when I was exposed to the movie, A Man for All Seasons, and then went to the length of reading a Catholic biography of this saint, as he became one of my principal heroes.

I was in high school, and not even Christian at the time, but accessible to heroism and a good story.

It had not escaped my notice that Thomas More had had his head chopped off. This did not usually cause much pain (except, the Tudors often combined it with torture). But More had been unjustly tried and convicted, and had time to "think about it," while a guest of the Tower of London.

Through all his parting conversations with friends, and unambiguous enemies, he had maintained not only calm, but a rich sense of humor. I soon learned that this humor, sometimes even slapstick, is a common quality among Catholic saints and martyrs.

And yet they do take death, even their own, seriously.

Given excruciating pain, there may be a certain amount of involuntary shrieking, but grumbling about fate and injustice is rare. There are Christian prayers to give thanks to God and heart to the afflicted, and these may be found in any traditional worship manual. You may say them, but in silence if necessary, or if not, in a moderate, unemotional voice.

The good non-Christians also share this habit, and the execution chamber is a good place to look for subtle, secretive Catholics and near-Catholics, and for the chance of witnessing a good death. Alas, the condemned do not stay very long to prattle, for the typical execution is fairly prompt.

To die well does not require a formal education or degree, but it does require preparation. It is, or would seem to be, the culminating moment for an organized life. This does not mean the most dramatic moment, and could be the opposite - especially if one is well-prepared.

For in that moment of "transition," where one is changing from a live person into a dead person - or rather like the dragonfly, a metamorphic change from nymph - one is not merely a mechanical thing who dies as a fly dies, perhaps by impact with an automotive windshield. It is more like being born....