Today Daren is strapped to a wheelchair, unable to support his own body's weight. His lungs are so weak that he must consciously draw in enough air to make his vocal cords work. He can no long move his arms, legs or body. He needs help to go to the bathroom. His flesh is slowly melting away from his bones.

At first Daren was in agony because he couldn't play, couldn't dance, couldn't earn money, couldn't drive his new Mercedes, couldn't make love -- in short, he could no longer live up to his models of who the thought he should be. But after a time, he began to see that it was not his illness that was the problem.

"It was those damn models," he realized. "Those models were always a hassle for me. They're like balloons with holes in them -- I've had to keep puffing and puffing all the time to keep them from collapsing. They're not really who I am." And gradually he's been able to let go of his identification with his models.

One day we were sitting and talking and he said to us, 'You know, I've never felt so alive in my whole life. I can see now how all the things I used to do to 'be somebody' actually separated me from really being alive. For all my outward success, my life back then was just a sort of busy, numb dullness."

He laughed and shook his head. "We're such fools, aren't we? We spend so much time polishing our personalities, strengthening our bodies, keeping up our social positions, trying to achieve this and that. We make such serious business of it all. But now that I can no longer do the things I thought were so important, I have so much love for so many things. I'm discovering a place inside I'd never looked at, never knew. None of the praise I received in the world brought me half the satisfaction I experience right now from just being."

Few Well Prepared for Death
Very few of the people we see are well prepared for their deaths, and no wonder. We are taught to keep thoughts of death out of our consciousness, ignore illness, to do our best to disguise the natural changes of aging. We grow up believing -- and teaching our children -- that we are not supposed to suffer. We are not supposed to grow old. We are not supposed to experience loss or pain.

We end up carrying a heavy load -- a great deal of fear of illness and death. When Ondrea had cancer, people were afraid to visit her. They were afraid to touch her. And if they did come, they were terrified.

The Pepsi Generation
One of the things we can learn from the dying is simply that it's all right to die. It's all right to be ill. It's OK to be in pain. Sometimes we'll be working with a group of cancer patients, we'll say, "You know, it's OK that you're suffering. It's OK to suffer." And there'll be a lot of shocked looks, like it has never occurred to them that it really could be OK.

It's the American way to be hale and hearty, and it's very difficult for us to accept the fact that illness and death are a normal part of life. Everyone in the Pepsi generation must grow old and suffer and die just like all previous generations. But our conditioning makes it very hard to accept that.

It's hard for us to accept situations in which we are unable to live up to our models of what's OK. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross used to say that someday she would like to write a book titled I'm Not OK and You're Not OK and That's OK.

We learn to work hard to be OK -- whatever that means for us. The dying can teach us a great deal about the ways we learn to distort ourselves, to diminish ourselves, to reshape ourselves in order to conform to that OK model, how we are raised to be constantly posturing, constantly inventing an acceptable reality.