Two years ago, I did a series of interviews with Ilene Kouzel, a friend dying of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The inteviews eventually were packaged into episodes for a podcast, Conscious Living, Conscious Leaving.

Ilene loved to tell the story about adding one of her caretakers to her bank account, to make deposits to the account. What she thought would be a simple call turned into much more of an ordeal and in a moment of frustration, Ilene blurted out:

"I have a horrible and fatal disease. I just want her to be on my account!" 

After that incident, Ilene liked to joke that the "fatal illness card" trumps most other cards.

A friend told me about a woman he knew that was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Before going to hospice, she was hospitalized. At the hospital, a physician who came from another country and didn’t speak English well came into her room and wanted to draw blood.  They argued a bit and finally the woman said,

"I’m going to be dead in 48 hours!  I don’t need blood work!  You need to work on your English language skills!  Go!  Go practice English & leave my blood alone!"

Both of these women were known by friends and family as feisty and spirited. We die as we live and we live as we die.

And finally, I saw this follow-up by the Wall Street Journal on Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor with pancreatic cancer whose "last lecture" captured the hearts of people around the world. I was struck by this quote from Paugh, who is the father of three young children:

"When I cry in the shower, I’m not usually thinking, "I won’t get to see the kids do this" or "I won’t get to see them do that." I’m thinking about the kids not having a father. I’m focused more on what they’re going to lose than on what I’m going to lose."

The pattern of our life doesn’t stop when death is around the corner. It just intensifies.