It's odd: you'd think that by watching my mother die young from a slow, agonizing, hellish death from cancer last year would've made me embrace the message of this letter. Instead, it did the opposite. I'm more "stuck" than ever. Depressed, lost my passion, no interest in any of the things I used to care about. Every muscle in my body is a knot and I grind my teeth in my sleep. Nothing helps, and my ability to "really live life," or to laugh, or have fun, or enjoy anything has tanked off a cliff. You'd think after ~18 months it'd be improving, but it isn't. Strange lesson in that, I think. The reality of your own death can be a form of intense release that makes you crave life more than anything -- it can even bring you a kind of weird, final, ecstatic joy. But when observing the same kind of slow death of another, day after day, the death enters you somehow. You die a little, lose your desire for "life". No real clue when this turns around or how, but I want to take this woman's advice very badly. Learning how to do it is not easy.