This is the last Q+A that Ilene sent me, less than two weeks before she died.

Typically, she would wait for me to email her a question and then she would email her reply. She found it easier to answer a question that I posed, rather than write spontaneously. The last couple of questions in this series were unsolicited–Ilene emailed a question she had created along with her answer. I’m interpreting that Question #10 and this last question covered topics that she wanted to be sure to address.

What have you learned about life from your terminal illness?

My life on the human plane has lots of activity and doing’ness.  Even though it’s mostly well spent and for good, it distracts me from ease, beauty, love and peace.  These are things that my disease has taught me to make more prominent in my life.   

Maybe others out there aren’t as slow as me.  But if you are, there is a lot to be said for finding a way to feel your “finiteness.”   Not for the deflation (although that might not hurt some of us,) but for getting down to what really matters most.  What I found is I needed something to help me get down to business, to keep me from getting lazy or too comfortable. 

We spend years fooling ourselves or playing games.  It gets tedious, repeating the same lessons over and over until we get them.  After I got terminally ill, I found I could move through those lessons more quickly.  It’s a lot more interesting when you advance rather than revisit the same old page. 

For some people life here seems pretty simple:  it’s for wealth, pleasure, joy, worth, power, learning, striving, creativity etc.

For me it was sometimes a treasure hunt, sometimes a lost in the woods search, for finding the way to express my soul in human form.  Who am I really?  What am I really about?  What is my purpose? 

For me, the answers to those questions can change fairly quickly.  I am open and fall in love with new ideas so easily, that I have to reconnect with my own vision and path or I get pulled off into others’ lands.  Not a bad thing, except I kept losing sight of my path and work.  I was finding I needed to consult my internal compass fairly regularly, for whether I was on course.  The illness helped me focus and zero in on things that really matter most.