The fear of death remains foreign to me, but for the first time I truly feel the tragic gift of mortality.

Many of my early memories revolve around my mother’s depression and her subsequent dying from it. During my fourth through sixth years, my mom had no will to live and expressed little joy. Her suicidal despondence taught me to think of death as a friend to invite, not an enemy to avoid. After her departure from this life, I spent the rest of my childhood fitting human impermanence into my worldview. It wasn’t easy, and along the way I also learned to fantasize and wish for different truths. But in the end the stark reality of love’s transience became solidly fixed in my adult philosophy.

You can spend a lifetime thinking of life as temporary and of limited ultimate value, but when you glimpse the unplanned end of your own time on this planet, mortality becomes far less abstract.

My last four days were spent in a hospital. Severe abdominal pain kept me awake most of Monday night, and by Tuesday morning I had no choice but to stretch out in the back seat of our truck while my wife drove me to the Emergency Department. It hurt too much to sit up, and the entire short drive was spent shivering from the frosty cold and cramping pain. After several hours of workup, the doctors informed me that a liter of fluid had been found next to my pancreas. They believed this was very likely blood from a sudden internal hemorrhage, but they were uncertain about its cause.

After a few days in the hospital the diagnosis remained unclear. The first considerations of pancreatitis and perforated ulcer were ruled out by further tests, and my wife and I were left with a short list of exotic benign problems but also the real possibility of pancreatic cancer.

As a physician, I know that this particular malignancy is highly lethal. It kills quickly and the longterm survival rate is extremely low. We hope, of course, that something else will explain my condition, but now that I’m back home awaiting additional studies, I’m finding mortality staring me down like never before.

You can contemplate suicide a thousand times and so convince yourself that death would not trouble you. But let the Reaper come knocking at your door in the form of a dangerous disease, and suddenly you realize that life is more precious than you ever admitted.

Any longterm reader of this blog has seen me become more welcoming of life’s uproar. I now find beauty in even the hardest circumstances, and I love all beings with more depth than I could have imagined in younger years. But although I’ve endeavored to walk through my days with increasing mindfulness, and to appreciate the shifting weather and achy momentum of my human body, this morning I am feeling life’s tender majesty with greater acuity than ever.

On our fence outside hangs a ceramic sun made in Mexico. It is a cheap item that we bought long ago. But seeing its bright, shiny face this morning nearly brought me to tears. How many more opportunities will I have to gaze upon this innocent bauble? How many times have I glanced its direction without noticing the serene, eternal message? Or appreciating my spouse’s sweetness in hanging an uplifting decoration where it can be seen every day whether I choose to look or not?

The clay sun is just a tiny example of how powerfully everything is hitting me right now. I hesitate to describe the wrenching, simple joy I feel in my humble stucco house, or how potent my wife’s worried smile feels to me as she gazes at me typing here next to the fireplace. So many heartrending gifts that I take in every day but seldom really feel. So much life surrounds me, and so much of it has passed me by as I obsessed about past mistakes or future problems.

Well, it all may turn out fine. Maybe it was just a burst aneurysm. Maybe I can go back to ordinary life without fear that the next six months will trace a slow, agonizing spiral toward extinction. But either way, I now see the futility of complaining about the problems we face. They will end soon enough, whether we want to let them go or not. In the meantime, our task is to embrace this terrible, spectacular, agonizing, and gorgeous moment of living. Most of all, we must love everybody and everything that shares our time on this plane, while we still can.

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