I read this slender book last night, a tribute by Calvin Trilling to his wife.

In one chapter he recounts Alice's sympathy towards the daughter of an old friend, who'd been raped by an intruder. Alice said that her lung cancer was comparable to the attack "only in that both were what she called 'realizations of our worst nightmares.' She said there was some relief at surviving what you might have thought was not survivable. 'No one would ever choose to have cancer or to be raped,' she wrote. 'But you don't get to choose, and it is possible at least to understand what Ernest Becker meant when he said something like "To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything," or to begin to understand the line in "King Lear"--"Ripeness is all." You might have chosen to become ripe less dramatically or dangerously, but you can still savor ripeness."