The diagnosis, he told me, served as a wake-up call. “What did it wake you up to?” I asked. “The finite nature of this life, for one thing. It brought the truth of my mortality into a more felt, easier-to-grasp dimension. While we all know it intellectually, psychologically we function with an avoidance or disregard for the reality of death. After the diagnosis, I’d be having conversations with people in the awareness that this might be the last conversation I ever had with that person. And that creates an extraordinary degree of shared presence, listening, care. So yes, total transformation.
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