An open confrontation with death allows many patients to…

Page 147. An open confrontation with death allows many patients to move into a motive existence that is richer than the one they experience prior to their illness. Many patients report dramatic shifts in life perspective. They are able to trivialize the trivial, to assume a sense of control, to stop doing things, they do not wish to do, to communicate more openly with families and close friends, and to live entirely in the present, rather than in the future or the past. As once focused turns from the trivial diversions of life, a fuller appreciation of the elemental factors in existence may emerge. The changing seasons, the following leaves, the last spring, and especially, the loving of others. Over and over we hear our patient say, why did we have to wait until now, till we are riddled with cancer, to learn how to value an appreciate life.

— from The Landing (Death) · Happier by Ben-Shahar

In the book

The people who have been forced closest to their own descent — the ones handed a terminal diagnosis — almost never report that the knowledge ruined them. An open confrontation with death tends to move a person into a richer, more vivid existence than the one they had before they knew. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross spent her life at the bedsides of the dying, and what moved her most was the sudden serenity that so often arrived at the end. — The Landing (Death)

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