How do we prepare for death? Walter Wangerin, Jr., deals with this hardest of all topics in his new book, Letters from the Land of Cancer.

Suddenly—in the midst of a life fresh and green and full of dreams—death intrudes. Your death. The real thing. Das ding an sich, as the Germans say: “The thing itself.”

And what may in the past have been a warning, perhaps a multitude of warnings, has suddenly become a dead-eyed decree. No longer is it the caution, “You will die.” Now it is the absolute mandate: “You are dying.”

And with that sentence comes “the dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns.”

“Thus says the Lord: ‘Set your house in order, for you shall die. You shall not recover.’ ”

Oh, God! My God! What is left for me?

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