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First off, I want to express my gratitude to the doctors and nurses who saved my life and took care of me as I recovered at the Gulf Coast Medical Center in Fort Myers, Florida. I am singularly grateful to my cardiologist, Nemalan Selveraj, and to my primary care physician, Shaila Hegde, both of whom embody a rare dedication to the healing arts and an extraordinary capacity for empathy. I also want to pay tribute to the amazing group of nurses at the Institute for Hermeneutic Phenomenology at the University of Buffalo’s College of Nursing. Among this group, I am especially thankful to Annie Vandermause and Suzanne Dickerson, whose friendship and support have been invaluable to me. And there are a number of philosophers, medical humanists, and scholars whose work inspired me and helped guide this project along, including Havi Carel, Arthur Frank, Joseph Davis, Gordon Marino, Drew Leder, Nicole Piemonte, Richard Polt, Fredrik Svenaeus, and the late Charles Guignon.

The initial ideas for this book came about in the weeks and months that followed my heart attack in December 2017. In an effort to make sense of my collapsing world, I worked on a couple of essays. The first was a short narrative of the experience, “Notes from a Heart Attack: A Phenomenology of an Altered Body,” later published in the collection Phenomenology of the Broken Body, edited by Espen Dahl, Cassandra Falke, and Thor Eirik Eriksen (London: Routledge, 2019). At around the same time, the sociologist Joseph Davis reached out and invited me to a conference on the ethics of aging held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. I was too anxious and weak to travel at the time but managed to write a paper for the event: “The Contraction of Time and Existential Awakening: A Phenomenology of Authentic Aging.” The conference papers were published in the collection The Evening of Life: The Challenges of Aging and Dying Well (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020). I am grateful to the editors of these two collections and to Routledge and the University of Notre Dame Press for permission to reprint portions of these chapters.

The excellent editorial team at Polity has once again exceeded all my expectations. I am deeply grateful to my commissioning editor, Pascal Porcheron, who was an early champion of the project and encouraged me to make the book more personal, in an effort to disclose more of my own emotional and philosophical struggles. He went through the entire manuscript line by line, offering valuable feedback and commentary throughout. And Manuela Tecusan’s masterful copyediting greatly improved the writing and corrected countless syntactical blunders. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their critical feedback and recommendations.

I also want to thank my loving partner, Jane Kayser, who was with me for the entire journey and offered unwavering support and encouragement as she listened to me read aloud from early chapters of the book. But, more than anyone, I am thankful to my parents, Jim and Margaret Aho. In the autumn of their own lives, they have taught me what it means to face up to mortality and to live with a sense of awe, gratitude, and joy. This book is dedicated to them.