ponder

What death unmasks was never more than a mask; to discover the grin of the skeleton, one need only lift off something that was neither beauty nor truth, but only a plaster and tinsel face.
From the vain mask to the corpse, the same smile persists.
But when the madman laughs, he already laughs with the laugh of death; the lunatic, anticipating the macabre, has disarmed it.

~Michel Foucault , Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason