It is this kind of truth-telling, served neat, that makes “Dying” so powerful and immediate; it is also what makes Taylor’s reassuring observations all the sweeter.

Image Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times

It is commonly said that end-of-life memoirs offer wisdom for the living. That is certainly true here. Dying has sharpened Taylor’s vision, occasioning a thorough life inventory, and writing, her métier, has given her a chance to linearize her thoughts. “I am making a shape for my death, so that I, and others, can see it clearly,” she writes, “and I am making dying bearable for myself.”

And for us. Take the subject of regret. Taylor has her own suitcase of disappointments — she’s not here to pretend that dying turns us into Edith Piaf — but she writes something quite liberating about it:

“The problem with reverie is that you always assume you know how the unlived life turns out. And it is always a better version of the life you’ve actually lived. The other life is more significant and more purposeful. It is impossibly free of setbacks and mishaps.”

Would that all of us could remember this as we’re wriggling into our hair shirts of lament.

Regret is even pointless, Taylor writes, when it comes to her own illness. While she’s not above asking “Why me?” (whereas Christopher Hitchens couldn’t countenance this question without boredom), she realizes she could have died many times before this moment — like the day a speeding sedan hit her car just seconds after she’d parked it and stepped away.

Then again, it’s possible she’d only have lost her legs if she’d been inside her car. Then she might today be alive, because she wouldn’t have had the mole where her melanoma first appeared. “I’d be legless,” she writes, “but still in good health.”

Dying turns many of us into counterfactual historians. But the alternate universe Taylor imagines is unusually provocative.

It’s almost inevitable that dying makes you reflect on your past, which perhaps explains why “Dying” is not merely a meditation on the present, but a journey backward in time, all the way to Taylor’s girlhood.