One of the best things that ever happened to me was getting pneumonia when I was 22 years old. It was the last in a series of minor calamities that hit me that first year out of college, alone and adrift in a Boston winter. I found myself flat on my back for the better part of two weeks, slowly recovering.

Sometime during those two weeks, something I had known for a long time became palpably, personally true: I was going to die. Not of pneumonia at age 22—there was never any real fear of that. But someday, I suddenly understood, I would lie down for the last time and never again get up. I understood it—which is to say, I stood under that reality, was grasped by it, accepted it. And without a lot else to do in my small apartment, I pondered it.

Death, whenever it came, would come too soon. Between now and that moment, what did I want my life to be?

I pondered the question of memory. It struck me that just a few decades after my death, the only people likely to remember me with any clarity at all would be a handful of family members. It was, and still is, exceedingly improbable that my life would be memorable enough for anyone else to take lasting notice. And then I strained to remember the names of my grandparents’ parents—and realized that very soon indeed, even to my own descendants, I would be a hazy and ultimately forgotten ghost from a past as distant to them as the nineteenth century was to me.

There was only one thing I was really sure would last after even those closest to me had forgotten me and passed into their own forgottenness. “Seek first the kingdom of God,” Jesus had said. I was, and still am, as sure as I could be (which is to say, just barely sure enough) that the kingdom of God had come and would never pass away, would indeed hold everything else in reality. But what did it mean, concretely, to seek the kingdom? What could I do differently with whatever life I was granted once the pneumonia was gone?