Dead and Alive

This book has a lot of stories pertaining to death. One phrase that caught my atttention was on page 78 when O'Brien says "you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable". This really was interesting to me because we always hear about how people see things in a life/death situation. In Dear John, John has a near death experience when he is shot. He tells his father that right before he blacked out, he saw coins and his dad. Coins was a memory he had with his father, so pretty much he just thought of his dad. He sees what was truly important to him throughout his entire life. The person that had been there for him no matter what. In addition, I read a book this summer called Secrets of a Shoe Addict. I honestly didn't like this book at all, but when reading The Things They Carried I was reminded of a scene in this book. One of the women in the book reveals that when she had a near death experience she did not see anything. She said it was then she realized she had nothing important or worth living for in her current life so she changed the way she lived. She became more holy and pretty much forgot her life before. I hope to never have this sort of experience, but if I did I hope that I see what I find most important to me.