Writing about the lives of 800 people who have died turns you into the reporter equivalent of that sage guru in cartoons who sits alone on a mountaintop. The job, people think, must inspire life-changing deep insights, and in a way it has -- though I am no better at answering life's deep unanswerable questions. But because I think about death a lot, I realized last year that if I live exactly as long as my father, I have 25 years left. That epiphany, along with other factors, led me to move from Greater Boston to a small town in Vermont. It's a long commute to the Globe, but I love where I live. Take it from an obituary writer: Don't put off what you've always wanted to do.