Here’s something my father once told me, when I was ten or so and hated, violently and for no reason, a girl in my fifth grade class: that I should feel love and compassion for everyone, no matter who they were, because in the countless past lives and reorganizations of atoms, every single person on earth was at one time or another my mother. It could be in the past or perhaps in the future, but on some existential plane, some other incarnation just as real as this one, everyone was my mother, and had given me life, and fed me, and cared for me, and therefore I owed them my love and gratitude.

“But I hate my mother too,” I said. (And why not? She was the one who chastised me, punished me, swore and screamed and pulled my hair when she was supposedly trying to braid it.)

“No, you don’t,” he said. “But all right, how about this. You can remember that everyone you know, even the worst person you know, even Veronica, was once me, or will be me in the future. I’ll die, like I have a thousand times, and because everything is connected, at some point, part of me will be Veronica, and part of Veronica will be me.”

I’d reached for him then, because the idea of his dissolution, his separation from me into millions of atoms and time and space and other people whom I hated, particularly Veronica, stupid Veronica with her ludicrous shiny unbraidable hair, was too much for me to bear. “I don’t want you to be anyone else,” I said. “You can’t die.”

“Death comes without warning,” he said. He spread his arms. “This body will be a corpse.” Then he took me to get a cinnamon bun. The people at the cinnamon bun place all turned and smiled when we entered, and they all knew my father by name, and remembered his order, and this reassured me. If the cinnamon bun people know your name, I figured, death can’t be so near.

Dentists are something like twice as likely as other people to kill themselves, of course. Everyone knows that, especially the daughters of dentists. Some years, more doctors kill themselves than dentists, but since dentists are much likelier to suffer from psychoneurotic disorders, that seems more or less down to luck. It’s stress, people say. Stress and access to drugs that’ll do the job. Plus, everyone hates going to the dentist. I can see how that would wear on a person. There’s no denying that the human mouth is a weird place to work. Teeth can readily alarm.

So when he was a day late returning, when he was a week late, a month late, with no word, the papers piling up—of course I considered it. Death comes without warning. But it can also be planned.