Marica Bodrožić writes about the wonder of human existence and shows how finitude and new beginnings release an ethics of tenderness. A sunny clinic garden, a deck chair in front of the hospice—and the realization: the authority of death is the authority of life. When the author receives a diagnosis that could mean her imminent death, she enters an “in-between space,” that zone where time has two beats: that of the body and that of consciousness. From this boundary experience, she describes how mortality sharpens perception and enables freedom. She retraces the thought movements of great philosophers and writers and asks what remains of us when all that is superfluous falls away. A literary-philosophical essay on mortality as a school of seeing—and on how the life that remains makes us more intense, more truthful, and freer.