The many guidebooks for the dead, from antiquity to current times, presume that death is not an ending but rather a transitional journey that requires attentive planning.  Seemingly ironically, these guidebooks are simultaneously about living life to the fullest, comporting oneself while keeping body and soul together, and knowing that our spiritual destination is inextricably tied to our corporeal choice making and conduct.  As Ptolemy Tompkins notes in The Modern Book of the Dead, those who hate and fear death are unable to live happily, while for those who think the right way about death, "life loses that gloom and becomes something entirely different: something larger, stranger, and in- finitely more promising and positive than we might ever have imagined."