Death is as impactful in the present as it was in the ancient world. And yet, as Patrick Geary stressed in the intro to Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, we moderns handle the phenomenon in a way foreign to ancient approaches. Whereas the present tendency is to minimize death, ancient peoples insisted on remaining intimate with the dead. Gregory of Tours perfectly exemplifies Geary's point, as his family raised him from earliest youth to embrace the “very special dead” as helpful patrons for the living. One salient benefit young Gregory perceived through the tutelage of kin was an assurance that saints would act to save him and others from deadly circumstances. This chapter will consider one of two major influences that went into shaping Gregory into the somewhat idiosyncratic bishop and author he became: early examples of his family's religious conduct. I have opted to open this chapter, as well as the others for Part I, with a brief narrative that emphasizes how Death (with a capital D) played a leading role in shaping our protagonist's career and fostering his conviction that Christian society in Gaul required the saints’ involvement. My decision to personify Death in the narratives of this section mimics the bishop's own jeu d’esprit. For while Gregory's literary agenda was earnest – after all, he perceived the eternal condition of readers’ souls to hang in the balance – this did not stop him from applying the occasional creative touch to his writings. In at least two instances Gregory personified Death as a willful being who possessed agency. The bishop's contemporary, Venantius Fortunatus, also sometimes personified Death in his poetry, and of course the practice was not without biblical precedent. Gregory consistently portrayed Death as a menacing foe, or otherwise a neutral to negative event, which again coincided with Fortunatus's common images of the figure as angry, hateful, grasping and threatening. Decades before the poet ever lent any influence to Gregory as litterateur, it was the latter's relatives who began the prerequisite work of turning the youth into a devotee of the saints.