Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death’s perfect punctuation mark is a smile.

Burchill reframes death not as an event that automatically demands grief, but as a kind of final editorial mark—“perfect punctuation”—that closes a life’s sentence. The quote argues that the emotional “correct response” depends on the quality and completeness of the life lived: honesty, success, or simply fullness can make death feel like a fitting conclusion rather than an intolerable rupture. The suggested smile is not callousness but recognition: a life well and wholly lived can be honored with gratitude, even wit, instead of obligatory sorrow. Implicitly, the line critiques sentimental conventions around mourning and insists on individual, context-sensitive responses to loss.