By John Grondelski, EWTN News - Human beings have always had a thirst for immortality. Even if they could not rationally prove it, the desire to be rather than not to be is so pervasive (at least before our times) that perhaps it, too, says something about who man is and what his life is for... Yet we have to grapple with the phenomenon of death — a phenomenon increasingly unfamiliar to people when death has been clinicalized, removed from the context of family and friends. What does that mean in terms of what a Catholic hopes for, especially in terms of the “last rites?”