Longtime National Post columnist Robert Fulford passed away on Tuesday at 92, after a long life well-lived. This is an excerpt from his last book, an essay in which he contemplated, among other things, death.

Sad and unsettling news arrived by phone early on the morning of Dec. 2, 1966: Ralph Allen, one of the best journalists of his time, a hero for me when I was a teenager and later a model of excellence in my profession, had died unexpectedly, at age 53. The call was a request that I write about him for the Toronto Star, where I worked for eight years in the 1960s and where Allen was managing editor at his death.