Chapter 9, All Hallows' Eve Summary and Analysis

Thomas wanted to know the day he would die for a variety of reasons, but it was a difficult matter to discover. His gene-pool was little help. Men in his family all died from their hearts in their mid-sixties. He then reviewed the deaths of his various family members. His father died of a heart attack when Thomas was sixteen, at sixty-four. He and Dan had to cress and casket him. Looking at his father's life caused him to consider his own death. The women in his family often lived a long time.

Thomas's grandmothers were powerful women and never fully abdicated power to their husbands. And then when the gender gap began to close, women lived more like men and his mother died twenty-eight months before his father, of cancer. Thomas developed a theory...