Meaning to help, Marie Curie, the charity for the dying, has listed 10 songs to listen to when the moment comes: Frank Sinatra's My Way, for example, or Over the Rainbow by Judy Garland. The thought terrifies me; as Oscar Wilde remarked of memorial statuary, it adds a new horror to death.

I suppose I'd unreasonably hoped that dying would be a quiet experience. That's unlikely in a hospital crammed with under-attended patients, bleeping machines and chatting nurses. It's unlikely anywhere, but there's no point asking for trouble.

Every death is a martyrdom, but as the stones rained down on the first martyr, St Stephen, it would have been a worse cruelty to have played My Way, exhorting him "To say the things he truly feels/ And not the words of one who kneels." Kneeling he was, as it happened, when he "cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge".

Another popular song put forward by Marie Curie, is Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You. Considering the danger of people "not wanting to be a burden" once the Assisted Dying Bill goes through, the first two lines of the song are unhelpful: "If I should stay/ I would only be in your way."

In the cupboard under the stairs, beside my umbrella, I've got the telephone number of a local priest, in the hope that I will be in a fit state to ring him when the time comes before conking out. Such plans can go awry, but I'd just like to withdraw something I wrote here a few years ago about dying. I said: "I think the real difficulty, for anyone, is that the doors of death are so narrow that they can only be entered in single file. You're on your own."

That is to fail to reckon on viaticum. That is the name of Holy Communion received in expectation of death. "The sacrament of Christ once dead and now risen, the Eucharist is here the sacrament of passing over from death to life, from this world to the Father," says The Catechism of the Catholic Church.

I've been thinking about the metaphorical "mechanics" of Communion. In the sacrament, you eat the living body and blood of Christ. As you swallow the sacrament in which he is present, the image you have is of him inside you at that moment. But you know that, unlike ordinary food (which turns into the recipient), here in Communion the recipient turns into the food received, Jesus Christ, and so takes part in the life of God.

So if viaticum is food for the journey - waybread, as people have begun to call it in the past 70 years - it also provides the only companion capable of passing the doors of death. The remarkable Epistle to the Hebrews discusses Jesus having reached the sanctuary of heaven with the sacrifice of his blood once and for all. He enters the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle that is not made by human hands. He enables us to go with him by the "way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh)".

Two things happen at once: the dying person eats the body and blood of Jesus; Jesus is present at the destination, which is to say heaven.

The Eucharist is the central act of Christianity, and the desire to receive the Body of Christ at death trumps any circumstances that makes this impossible. Christ does more than hold our hand while we are dying. In passing through the curtain of death the dying person inevitably does so in constant contact with the Body of Christ.

This is the "final curtain" we face, not Frank Sinatra's theatrical finale.