You wouldn’t know it from reading this blog, but I’ve been in bed pretty much since Sunday with a nasty bronchial virus, and seasonal allergies. Yesterday was a better day, and I got out a bit, but today I was down for the count again. One good thing about this blogging software is I can write posts ahead of time, and publish them between naps. I’ve turned my phone off, and on the occasion I’ve answered it, the person on the other end has wondered who they were talking to. (“Froggy, zat you?”)

This isn’t much, and it too shall pass, but it’s a reminder of how precarious one’s health always is, no matter how solid everything seems. I have a surprising number of friends whose lives have been intimately touched in the past year by cancer. Just this afternoon came word that a friend back East lost someone very dear to her last night, to cancer. He died in his sleep. Not long ago, a friend’s wife had radical cancer surgery days after her mother died from cancer. And, of course, my sister Ruthie died from lung cancer at age 42. Never smoked a day in her life. One day she started coughing, and couldn’t stop. And that was that.

Yesterday I interviewed one of my sister’s friends for the book I’m doing about her. The consistent thing that everyone — I mean every single person — who knew Ruthie always says is this: “When you were with her, she made you feel like you were the most important person to her.” The guy I talked to yesterday said that as well. He added that the reason so many people around here loved Ruthie and her husband Mike so fiercely is because they both were so good, and treated everyone with such kindness. “They were not takers,” he said. “They never were looking out for themselves. They only wanted to be good to people, and to do right. They didn’t want what they didn’t have. They were so humble, and just so thankful for everything.”

That really was true of Ruthie, and is true of Mike. Those five lines are just about the best tribute to a life well lived any of us could hope to receive. They were not takers. Having read Breitbart’s obituaries today, and working every day on this book about Ruthie’s well-lived life, I drifted off to sleep this afternoon thinking about what my own obituary would say if I dropped dead tomorrow. It wouldn’t be anywhere close to Ruthie’s, I can tell you that. The thing is, it’s in my power for it to be. There’s nothing saying that I can’t wake up tomorrow and choose to be more like her.

To be sure, Ruthie was a peacemaker by nature. She hated controversy, and was willing to endure all kinds of things she shouldn’t have put up with, for the sake of keeping the peace. The last conversation I had with her, four days before she died, I was pushing her to let me get involved in a situation in which a tradesman was taking advantage of her and Mike. No, she said, let me handle this. I’ve got this thing. I knew good and well she didn’t have that thing, but I also knew that she was the kind of person who would try her best to convince the lazy tradesman to do the right thing out of love and a sense of personal honor, not because she got in his face and read him the riot act, which he absolutely deserved.

I don’t think we are all called to be that irenic. It’s hard for me sometimes to understand why Ruthie did some of the things she did. Nevertheless, you ought to hear what I’m hearing these days: these conversations in which people talk about the way she was, the compassion she had for people, and the things she did for them that made everybody walk away from her feeling loved. We should all want people to remember us that way, I think, or at least to remember us with such kindness, respect, and gratitude. A woman I talked to about Ruthie today said all the great things everybody else did about her, and added, “The amazing thing about her is that she wasn’t a goody-two-shoes. She was real. She was the most authentic person I’ve ever known.” The point here is that her goodness wasn’t the sort of plaster-saint sanctity that’s untouchable. As her daughter Hannah told me, “Mama didn’t know the Bible all that well, but she lived it.”

It’s a humbling exercise to think about what your obituary would say if you died tomorrow, if it were honest. The best mine could say about me is that I loved my family. Beyond that, there’s only a list of professional accomplishments, about which … so what? In the gaze of eternity, so what? I do h0pe and pray, though, that I live long enough to finish this book about my sister. That will count for something, I think. Still, I can’t get away from the thought that there’s no reason I can’t live more like her now, today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. No reason, except for that it’s hard.

Let me put the question to you, readers: What would your obituary say if you died tomorrow, and if it were honest? Are you satisfied with that? Why or why not? Answer anonymously if you prefer.