A similar thing happened to me back in 1991. It wasn't cancer. It was a car accident. My mom tried to pass a tanker truck at 85 mph, and she lost control of the car and died. I was in the lucky seat and walked away from the wreck without a scratch. I didn't realize before how fragile and random all of us are. My life went in a completely different direction after that. I tried to get back into my professional career, but everything I thought was important before the accident didn't make sense anymore. Whoever said "the one who dies with the most toys wins" is wrong. The one who is the nicest and most helpful wins. I'm sure of it. And I never ever want to walk out the door angry, or let anybody else walk out the door angry, in case I never see them again.

I did go through a long phase where I traveled a lot, learned new sports, and basically tried to cram in everything on the Bucket List. I'm starting to slow down a little now that some of the major things are checked off.

You may find it impossible to go back to the way things were before. You may find that your priorities have completely changed. You're marching to the beat of a different drummer now. I hope that your family is able to keep up with you. I lucked out. My family has been very understanding.

The biggest pitfall to watch out for is this: Don't assume that your life will be short. Keep planning for the future. I think I neglected this, because I couldn't visualize myself living past my mom's age.

Plastic surgery?? A couple of tattoos??? One would have hoped that such a confrontation with your own mortality and the fleeting nature of the bodymind and of the world-as-you-know-it would have been sufficient to turn you forever away from the arena of "identity (re-)establishment via modification of shapes and surfaces," towards a recognition of your essential, unconditioned, non-timebound nature.

Since that does not seem to have happened, you may as well get the breasts done, get the tats, and while you're at it, head out to Burning Man where you can meet up with Cary and so many other jugglers of shapes and surfaces.

You talk about facing death, the uncertainty of your diagnosis, the worry that you might not recover, might not survive the cancer. This is a huge experience, and I think the nature of such experiences is to blind you to the experiences of others. Their experiences are too much for you when you are facing your own death. But now, you are no longer facing death; you are facing the rest of your life, and you are facing their disapproval. You need to understand why they disapprove, if only so you can be at peace with that.

Your family and your husband thought they would lose you. They lived through this time with the fear that you would be gone, that your parents would outlive their child, that your husband would never grow old with you. While you had to face your death, they had to face your loss.

And now that you are healthy, and the cancer is gone, you refuse to reassure their fears. You make them worse, by all your plans for adventure, by coming out of this as a different person. The person they feared losing seems to be dead and this globetrotting stranger has appeared in her place.

So if you want to explore, without losing your close friends and family, you need to present your new outlook as an expansion of your old self, not a replacement. What were the high points of your old life? What things did you share with family? Keep these, in your new quests for travel and adventure. Go, see the world, but come back in time for Christmas dinner at your parents. Go skydiving, but have your husband take pictures at the landing site to show everyone. You cancer has shown you that you have to focus on the things that interest you, the things that are important to you. But your family needs to know that they are among the important things too.

Dear LW,

You are most certainly a whack job. But hey, I can't blame you for it. You experienced a very near brush with death and now you're acting out, albeit in a slightly odd and narcissistic way.

You want to experience life. That's great and I understand it, the thing is, I take a point of exception at the way you want to go about doing it. Think about this practically for a minute:

What will happen to those tattoos once you're dead and rotting in the ground? Who's going to exist to cherish all those wonderful memories of you skydiving, or white water rafting, or whatever other extreme sport you want to do? Sure, they may enrich your life (at least while you still have a life), but they're not really going to leave anything behind.

And that I think, is the issue that you should be focusing on.

You've gotten a rare opportunity - a second chance at being the kind of person you want to be. Now, if the person you want to be is a narcissistic hedonist, then fine - more power to you, but I have the feeling that this isn't something that you've examined too closely, and I can't blame you for it since it seems like the life and death struggle you've been locked in has disoriented you and forced perhaps a "knee jerk" reaction.

Take some time. Think. Is legacy important to you? Is being remembered important to you? If so, what for? How do you value what is a successful life; is it the number of experiences you take to the grave with you, or the aftershocks of the rippling wake of your existence?

Certainly, "picking your life up where you left off" is out of the question. I think any reasonable person would instinctively know this, so ignore your family on that count. What's important however is the course you now choose to chart for yourself and the ramifications of this decision.

You'll figure it out eventually, I know you will, but take a deep breath before you launch into your future. Right now you definitely seem "whacked", and I think you need to put some distance in between you and the Grim Reaper so that you can center yourself. I say this with a certain amount of authority because I myself had a very close brush with death and I admit that the first thing that popped into my mind wasn't all the tattooing and skydiving that I missed, it was something equally as banal - I should have had one last good dinner at Mizuki's sushi boat.

Thankfully, that didn't last very long and I came about (in my own way) to a much more sensible and ultimately more fulfilling use of my time than gorging myself on 3 dollar blue plates of Japanese food.

I think you can also do better than what you are currently contemplating, which means of course, that you should contemplate harder and deeper. Once you've hit upon what you need to do, you wont have to write to advice columnists because you will know what needs to be done. It is the remarkable certainty of someone who has a purpose for living and in time this will come to you.