Perhaps it's only when we fully accept that we will die that we can fully accept how alive we are right now.Death brings perspective, then. It brings us back to life and it asks of me, how, now, will I live? A friend works at a hospice, and recently she cared for a man who just had days left. They talked about his childhood, she tells me, and then she asked him what makes life good? She wrote down his words.It's "when we assume nothing," he said, "when we give more than we take, when we need less, when we smile often, when we dream big, when we laugh frequently, and when we find comfort in knowing how blessed we are.How blessed we are. The poet Rilke said, "Being here is so much." And whether you believe death is the end or, like me, that it is only the beginning, life is surely not about the time we have left - days, weeks, years? - but about the time we have now.