If I could save time in a bottle

This breaks my heart. A Newsday columnist was told she has about two to three months left to live. She has lung cancer, and is just 39.

In this short piece, she tries to come to grips with all the things she will never do, and with knowing that her time is so, so short. Can you imagine? You'd never want to waste a moment, yet the knowledge of your timeline would never leave your brain, so you could never truly lose yourself in the small joys of living.

Perhaps the luckiest are those of us who know not the hour of our death, who still are blessedly allowed to think we are eternal, that we are the only people who can get out of this world alive.

When Elizabeth Edwards explained to her young children that her cancer had returned, she and her husband John supposedly said "who here is never going to die?" And her children didn't speak up, because even at their young ages, they had been taught that none of us live forever. Those kids know more about life and death at their young ages than many of us adults.

(Via Romenesko.)