My Rendezvous with Life

Book excerpt: First published in 1935, this book by famous film actress Mary Pickford is an essay on death and her belief in an afterlife and the undying human spirit. “When we stop to consider that all of life, as we understand it, springs from a little seed, then a progression of life beyond this present experience should not seem such a miraculous thing. “The development of a Sequoia tree growing two hundred and fifty feet into the air and living five thousand years is, to me, more amazing than the transition we call death. “And so why do we humans in this world think of our progression out of it as such a great mystery when the wise ones through the ages have assured us that the only part of us that really can be destroyed is our false and limited conception of life?”—Mary Pickford