You can always find a shock of beauty or meaning in what life you have left. - BJ Miller

By facing mortality, it seems to inform how you live. So, the secret is that facing death has a lot to do with living well…

We make something normal, we call it a problem, we pathologize it, and then we go to war with it. Sometimes that works pretty well, and oftentimes it works not at all. In the case with end of life and death, it's a mix. Medical science and our understanding of health has advanced, and we are able to live longer, and we have pushed back on nature in all sorts of ways that I'm happy for…But the bad news is we just keep orphaning this subject of death, and it becomes less and less familiar and then more and more surprising and gets harder and harder than it needs to be.

Leaning into the subject of suffering, leaning into the subject of mortality, was directly therapeutic for me. It wasn’t an intellectual interest or a recreational thought...Getting through my day required me to lean into it, and that’s where I just saw all this beauty that comes from it.