I call them lifequakes, because the magnitude with which they upend our lives is exponentially worse than everyday disruptors. Lifequakes involve a fundamental shift in the meaning, purpose, or direction of a person’s life. I think of them as BCE/CE moments (or BC/AD in the old vernacular), in which a person’s life story gets divided into a before and an after. A full decade following my cancer diagnosis, I still use the experience to demarcate time: I haven’t been to that restaurant since I got sick. My wife does the same with the birth of our daughters, my brother with the Great Recession.
