Cardiac arrest. CPR. ICU. “It doesn’t sound so good,” the caller said.

We thought of him as Superman: tall, trim, fit, handsome, strong.

Meticulous in his diet; committed to his exercise. The epitome of health.

Invincible, we thought.

Then the day after his 50th birthday, he dropped.

A savage reminder of our vulnerability, our mortality; the tenuousness of it all.

All of us have hopes and dreams and plans and aspirations. About who we want to be. Places we want to go. Things we want to do.

We tell ourselves that we’ll get to them next week, next year, when the kids are out of school, when we retire.

We delude ourselves. We tell ourselves there’s time.

We  put things off.

We like to pretend: that we will live forever; that we’re invincible; that we’re immortal; that life is not capricious; that death does not exist.

And yet it does.

When someone like our friend is stricken – all of us have known that moment – we get the whack in the face: we know again that it all changes in an instant; that death is near.

And in its shadow, there is the urgency, a mandate, to live: deeply, fully, richly, intensely; without pettiness or waste.

Don Juan said this:

Death is our eternal companion. It is always to our left, at an arm’s length… It has always been watching you. It always will until the day it taps you.

How can anyone feel so important when we know that death is stalking us?

The thing to do when you’re impatient is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you catch a glimpse of it, or if you just have the feeling that your companion is there watching you.

Death is the only wise adviser that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do , that everything is going wrong and you’re about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you’re wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, ‘I haven’t touched you yet.’

The legendary Steve Jobs lived with that intensity and taught the lesson well:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?'”

“And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

Here’s the truth: There is no time. Now is all we have. Live large. Play full out. Don’t waste a single moment.

Death, like Joe Black, lurks just beyond the shadows.

Our friend will live to celebrate another day.

But Kryptonite is everywhere.