It is not uncommon that on the face of those whom we love and who have just left us [in death] there is seen a smile of exquisite sweetness. One does not smile when one has entered into death, but when one lives still in the moment that one is going to enter into it. This divine smile is the mark here on earth, on that which men call a dead man, or a dead woman, of a beatitude and of a life which has begun when earthly existence was about to end and which will never end.
Jacques Maritain (1882–1973)