Life is short.  What are we living for?  Can we see who we are and who we’ve become?  Can we see the world six inches past our own nose?  Are we ready to meet God?  Are we awake or are we asleep? I need to be clear: St. Paul called death “the last enemy to be defeated.”  I repeat, death is not a good thing in and of itself.  But the God who loves us more than life itself uses death to try to wake us up from our slumber, to shake us up like the grandmother in O’Connor’s story and open our eyes to the reality of the state we’ve gotten ourselves into and the life that really is life.  How many people there are who’ve come near to death for the first time and realized how precious every day is, how so much of what we think matters really doesn’t, how much we’ve made a mess of things or how foolish we are to hold onto some grudge, and how we may not have many more chances to change our lives.