Cancer and the Paradigm Shift

There are a lot of things that happen when you receive a potentially life shortening diagnosis, as you might imagine.  One of them for me is that suddenly things that had no significance for me now seem personal.
When I am watching a movie and one of the characters has a mother who died, I now think that that could be my children.  Or there is someone who is widowed.  That could be my husband.  It is really very sobering.  So while I have thought for a long time, since my youngest son was diagnosed with cancer fifteen years ago, that I was living life like there might not be a tomorrow, there have been very real parts of that that I have been missing.
So is that morbid or realistic?  Probably a little bit of each.  I will probably mellow on this a bit over time, and it probably makes sense to think about what I want to do for the important people in my life before I go.  Because you just never know.  But I hope to dwell less on it as time goes on and have it be more of the background noise than the foreground thoughts as I move into the next year.