Saturday morning Punk Rock Mommy died from inflammatory breast cancer.

Her husband uploaded her last post and I read it

and cried.

I never met Punk Rock Mommy, I had never read her blog before this morning. But I am struck by the human spirit and how impending death can clarify perspective. Punk Rock Mommy couldn’t be more different from my father, yet they both died from cancer in the past year, and they both, in that last year of their lives, gained a super-human measure of perspective and wisdom. Things that separated my dad from Punk Rock Mommy and Randy Pausch (who wrote The Last Lecture), things like religion, ethnicity, gender, and politics are superficial labels, but underneath – we’re all more alike than different. The messages that they left us with (or are leaving us with, Randy Pausch is still fighting pancreatic cancer) are essentially the same: love one another, choose to be happy, don’t ruin the rest of your life mourning, don’t live your life in “someday,” live right now, don’t waste your time on anger it’ll just ruin your day. This quote from Punk Rock Mommy really leaped out at me: “I am no doormat, but I just let go of all that hard core resentment.”

How can we learn from this? What would you do differently if you had a week, or a month, or a year left to live? What would you write in your last post? What message would you leave for your family, friends, and the world’s prying eyes?