Arts critic Terry Teachout nearly died from congestive heart failure. He wrote an elegant piece about the experience. It includes a lovely passage from a novel I’d never heard of, The Edge of Sadness:
I believe with all my heart in the mercy and providence of God, and I believe in a future unimaginably brighter and better than anything I have known here–and yet of course the whole difficulty is that I have known and have loved “here.” Very much. So that when the time comes for me to go, I know that I will go with full confidence in God–but I also know that I will go with sadness [. . .]
You oughtta read the whole post.