This story originally published online at The Assembly.
Nabarun Dasgupta spends many afternoons walking through the 200-year-old cemetery across the street from his Raleigh home. Strolling among the gravestones, he thinks about how death is merely part of the process of living, a bookend of a short-term existence.
As an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies street drugs, Dasgupta is used to hearing from colleagues and friends about fatal overdoses. The deaths are not just statistics to Dasgupta. They’re personal. He’s been to a lot of funerals…