A student of His Holiness the 17th Karmapa helps readers discover new ways of facing and experiencing life, death, and impermanence.
"With my diagnosis of grade IV brain cancer, I no longer observe the truth of impermanence from a critical, analytical distance. I am crashing into it, or it into me."

Facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, Karen Derris-professor, mother, and Buddhist practitioner-turned to books.

By reading ancient Buddhist stories with new questions and a new purpose-finding a way to live with her dying body-she discovers new ways to make them immediate and real. For instance, reading with her terminal prognosis, she becomes one of the four omens (the four signs of impermanence and suffering) the young Siddhartha sees in his excursions from the palace. What would it mean for her to be in the crowd, straining to see the prince with her own sick and impermanent body-to be pushed aside and out of sight by the palace...