"Friends and family often wondered, is she being unrealistic—shouldn't she be worrying? fretting? unhappy? But the fact is, by living in the present, by refusing to live in the future, she began exactly to live consciously with death.
Think about it: death, if anything, is the condition of having no future. By living in the present, as if she had no future, she was not ignoring death, she was living it. And I was trying to do the same." Ken Wilber, Grace and Grit.
After I finished reading Grace and Grit I couldn't sleep, not sure what was going on, but when I told someone about the book I started weeping. Then I knew what was going on.
Treya Killam Wilber fought so hard and died anyway within five years. I had a good prognosis and knew I could easily live another twenty years after my December 2010 surgery. Or not. The Buddhists tell us to live our death. This doesn't mean worrying all the time. It means living NOW, whether you have twenty minutes or twenty years left.
I try to do the same.
