My husband and I need a new mattress. We’ve been sleeping on the old one forever, and no matter which way we flip it, there are us-shaped troughs in its increasingly uncomfortable surface. I keep putting off a replacement. It’s partly not wanting to spend the money, partly that I’m afraid of making the wrong choice (hard or soft? foam or cotton?), and partly that I keep thinking about something I’d rather not think about: This new mattress could be the first of the last things.

I am middle-aged and strong. But I can also remember my grandmother — my father’s mother — as strong and active. She was a dancer, a physical therapist, a pioneer of movement studies. At 80, she was finishing a book, teaching at the University of Hawaii, taking up Chinese calisthenics. We thought she was immortal. Then she got sick, spent six months in the hospital, and died.

I remember my mother, too, as strong. Not in an athletic way — her favorite activity was to sit around and talk — but she was so vital and savvy and grumpy that I thought she was immortal. Then she got sick, was sick for a long time, and died.

I’ve always been the visitor in the hospital, the one who strides down the hall to refill the pitcher with ice water. But I get it, that no one can be the visitor forever.

Years ago, when my younger son was 6, I went to say goodnight, and he was crying. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, but eventually, reluctantly, he said it had to do with tombstones. I saw that suddenly the idea of death had become real to him. You get those glimpses when you are young. Then you sort of get used to the idea of death, and if you’re lucky — healthy, well fed, living in a country that is not at war — you can forget about it for a long time. But you lose grandparents. You lose your parents. You start to understand, in a new and visceral way, that life is finite.

On a late October afternoon last year, when I was staying in Stockholm, I went for a walk. Just as it was getting dark, I wandered into an old churchyard and saw that the ground was carpeted with burning candles. The graveyard was full of people — families with children, couples, solitary older women, men, more and more people walking in through the gates, bending to light candles and putting boughs and flowers on the graves. Suddenly I realized it was Halloween — not American trick-or-treat Halloween, but old-fashioned, original Halloween: All Hallows’ Eve. It was a night to visit and honor the dead, part of the three-day observance that also includes All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.

Standing in that candlelit churchyard, I thought about my parents and about my grandparents. Going to visit their graves isn’t something I do. That isn’t where they are. I would rather remember my mother’s frankness and her quick humor, my father’s way of listening to me without judgment and his gentleness with my son. I don’t want to think about their deaths, my mother’s paralysis and blindness, her slow decline; my father’s suicide.

But watching all those families walking in with their carryall bags full of flowers and greenery, I felt I was seeing an attitude toward death that occupied some quiet, clear-eyed middle ground. This was a Halloween whose terrors were not artificial — no leering monsters, no zombies. The terror is real: We die. It didn’t feel macabre, but it wasn’t denial either. It was a pause to acknowledge that death is part of life. There were candles burning and it was dark. It was people standing still for a while with loss and mystery.

Joan Wickersham’s column appears regularly in the Globe.