In fact, stop reading whatever book you’re reading and read Chasing Daylight.

This is, perhaps, the most important book you’ll ever read. In the book, Eugene O’Kelly documents his experiences during the last few months of his life. In fact, his wife writes the final chapter because Eugene has died. And no matter how tough you are, the second you turn the page from the end of the second-to-last chapter to the beginning of the last chapter and realize that Corinne has taken over, you’ll be in tears.

What this book does — at least what it did for me — was give me the perspective on what I’m doing and where I’m going with my life. He inspires the question: am I really doing what matters to me? And if not, why? For all the words that so many people like David Allen and Stephen Covey say and write to get people thinking about these questions, their words just don’t compare to the words of a dying man.

It’s powerful, and it’s life changing. So, like I said, stop reading whatever book you’re reading and read Chasing Daylight. It’s not even to 200 pages, so you should be to finish it in just a few hours.

To get you started, here are a few of the opening paragraphs:

I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live. You think that to put those two sentences back-to-back, I must be joking. Or crazy. Perhaps that I lived a miserable, unfulfilled life, and the sooner it was done, the better.

Hardly. I loved my life. Adored my family. Enjoyed my friends, the career I had, the big hearted organizations I was part of, the golf I played. And I’m quite sane. And also quite serious: the verdict I received the last week of May 2005 — that it was unlikely I’d make it to my daughter Gina’s first day of eighth grade, the opening week of September — turned out to be a gift. Honestly.

Because I was forced to think seriously about my own death. Which meant I was forced to think more deeply about my life that I’d ever done. Unpleasant as it was, I forced myself to acknowledge that I was in the final stage of life, forced myself to decide how to spend my last one hundred days (give or take a few weeks), forced myself to act on those decisions.

In short, I asked myself to answer two questions: must the end of life be the worst part? And, Can it be made a constructive experience — even the best part of life?

No. Yes. That’s how I would answer those questions, respectively. I was able to approach the end while still mentally lucid (usually) and physically fit (sort of), with my loved ones near.

As I said: a blessing.

Of course, almost no one thinks in detail about one’s actual death. Until I had two I didn’t — not really. We fill general and profound anxiety about, but figuring out the nuts and bolts of how to make the best ones last days, and then how to ensure that one follows the planned course of action for the benefit of oneself and one’s loved ones, are not typical habits of the dying and most certainly not the healthy and hearty. Some people don’t think about that because a come suddenly and prematurely. Quite a few who died this way — in a car accident, say — had not yet even began to think of themselves as mortal. My death on the other hand, while somewhat premature (I was fifty three at the time of the verdict) cannot be called sudden (anyway, you couldn’t call it that two weeks after the death sentence had sunk in), since I was informed quite explicitly that my final day of this or if what happened during the two thousand five calendar year.

Like I said, life-changing. Read the book.