All of the paintings from this series are, like this one, horizontal compositions; all of the paintings in the sister series, Public Faces are vertical.  This was a deliberate choice that I hoped would reveal something more about how we understand death and dying.  In retrospect, these compositional choices seem rather obtuse, but this was one of my first timid steps towards putting more of the concept of the series into the paintings themselves—an idea that didn’t fully blossom until three years later with Apple Pie.