Fatima Ali died yesterday, at age 29. She was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer right after appearing on Top Chef, which was looking to be a high point in her life. Only a few months after an initial treatment when things were looking up again, she got news that the chemo didn’t work, the cancer had metastasized, and she had a year to live.

She wrote about her experience with living with cancer. One article was a note to herself at age 18, encouraging that former self to be brave in spite of what’s ahead, to spend more time with her family and loved ones, and soak in the moments she has. She also wrote to tell her younger self that she’ll never quite be free from this cancer that’s thrown a weighty chain over her life, but that despite some days not being able to recognize herself anymore, she’d learn to not only wear her chains with grace, but to become the grace herself.

I’m not quite sure why it got to me the way it did when I heard of her passing. After all, my fiancee is the huge Top Chef fan, not me. I just knew she was a cook with some spunk, who has been battling hard for the last several months. She went on the Ellen show and talked about how she wanted to spend the last year of her life going to all these restaurants she’s always wanted to visit and travel the world with her mom trying all different kinds of food.

The way it hit me was as if I knew this lady more deeply than I did. Or as if could tell you something about her that no one else knew. None of which are true. But it still hurts in a way I can’t entirely explain. Maybe she just made it very real. The pain of realizing that this life that looked so happy and successful and future that looked so promising for someone still so young, that it was all illusionary and shattered right in front of her eyes. That it didn’t matter how many fans she had, what a light she was to the people around her, or how successful she was in living out her passion, cancer just chooses indiscriminately whose life to cut short.

And the finality of it all. How that picture was the last one she’d post. The last thing she’d say to her fans.

It makes me reevaluate the important things. It makes me want to slow down and taste the food I’m eating, spend more time with the people I love and who love me, and not give such a care to things that don’t matter in the end, like what people think of me.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Fatima had written, “When we think we have all the time in the world to live, we forget to indulge in the experiences of living. When that choice is yanked away from us, that’s when we scramble to feel.”

I hope I can live well, love much, forgive quickly, and soak in the moments I have, not so afraid of it all being torn away that I shrink back from such joy. Instead, I hope to, as Brene Brown would say, lean into the discomfort and fear of it all, and instead burst from overwhelming love, joy, and the sense of aliveness.

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life,” Joseph Campbell wrote. “I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive…”

May today be a fresh reminder that being fully alive, even if just for this very moment, even if I’m doing nothing spectacular or out of the ordinary but being aware of all the love and joy already in my life, is the best gift I could ever hope for.