I grew up on a farm in central Iowa. Until my family moved to Texas when I was 11, my social calendar more or less revolved around an evangelical Lutheran church, which taught, among other things, that evolution was a lie—a hoax perpetuated by enemies of Jesus who ran around planting phony fossils in the earth in order to mislead the public. Also, the Smurfs were Satanic.

Although my mom and dad somehow managed to throw off the fundamentalist shackles that imprisoned nearly everyone else in town, social pressures in our tight-knit community kept our family going back to church. Week after week, my parents walked the unsung line of enlightened rural folk everywhere, saving public face by sending me to catechism—and diligently deprogramming me upon my return.

This evangelical tension, combined with some bookish inclinations, led me to develop an enduring fascination with all things religious, mythical and esoteric. As a kid, I kept an encyclopedia volume stashed under my bed. My favorite article was on comparative religion, and I secretly savored its images of multi-armed Hindu deities with a voracity other children reserved for comic books or magazines they found in their fathers’ sock drawers. During one such investigation into the taboo beliefs of people who lived beyond the borders of the farm, I stumbled upon an article about chiromancy, the ancient practice of palm reading. And that’s when I discovered that my life line ends abruptly in the middle of my hand.

I was unsure about what this meant, and still am. According to some traditions, the length of the life line is tied to longevity. Others insist that credible palmists use the life line only to discern information about character—never as a predictor of destiny. At any rate, I decided to take inventory of the other life lines in my house. My sister’s was normal, at least in proportion to her toddler hand. My dad’s was a long and deep crease, bearing familial resemblance to the frown lines in his forehead. And my mom’s was just like mine: a blunt, austere roadmap to the middle of nowhere.

In 2003 I moved to Seattle with my husband, my cat and my diminutive life line. Last summer, we bought a house—a 1935 bungalow with French doors, coved ceilings and hardwood floors. It’s the perfect place for my great-grandmother’s dining room set, which my parents decided to bring to me.

Always eager to take road trips, my mom and dad viewed my sudden need for quality home furnishings as the perfect opportunity for a big one. The trip required them to drive from Texas to Iowa to get the goods out of storage, pack everything into their van and truck it out to Seattle. They looked forward to the journey for months, and by all accounts they had a blast.

They spent a day scouring the gift shops at Mount Rushmore in search of the tackiest souvenir they could find: a plastic ornament featuring an image of sculptor Gutzon Borglum rapelling down George Washington’s giant schnozz. They found the raunchiest postcard in the entire state of Wyoming and sent it to my sister. (You don’t want to know.) My mother took photographs of about a hundred mountains that all looked the same and e-mailed them to everyone in her address book. My father, who served a brief stint in the U.S. Air Force in the early ’90s, got an enormous kick out of wearing a sweatshirt that proclaimed, “BUSH LIED AND OUR SOLDIERS DIED” into gas stations in 10 different red states.

They arrived at my house on Dec. 16, 2005, and stayed for five days—long enough to celebrate my 27th birthday and fill my freezer with baked goods. Then they turned around and headed back to Texas. On Dec. 23 at 7:37 p.m. PST, my mom called to let me know they were just a few miles from home.

It was the last phone call she ever made. A few minutes after we hung up, they were hit head-on by a drunk driver. According to the accident report, Mom died instantly. Dad died about an hour later in the emergency room. He was wearing his Bush shirt.

My life was fundamentally and irrevocably transformed in a fraction of a second. One day my mom and dad were shopping for dirty postcards and pissing off Republicans. The next day my sister and I were picking them up from a Fort Worth crematorium in unremarkable cardboard boxes roughly the size of bricks.

In 1976 , when my parents got married, death was already a central theme in their lives. My dad lost both his brother and his father in farm accidents when he was in his teens. My mom’s mom, whose health was declining rapidly at the time of my parents’ wedding, died of cancer soon after. Her husband, my mom’s dad, died of a heart attack a few months later.

By the time they were in their late 20s, my parents had inherited something that few people in our cushy, postindustrial society ever get: an immediate personal awareness that life is terrifically finite. They knew death was more than the specter that cruises retirement homes, gumming cold macaroni and watching the History Channel in a comically open-backed gown. It is always inside us, gaining territory with every fragile breath.

To deal with this awareness, my logical, intellectual father constantly strove to improve his quality of life. Perennially convinced that at least one crucial decision obstructed him from some unrealized dream, he switched careers frequently and enrolled in graduate school on four separate occasions.

My mother was just the opposite. While my dad restlessly indulged his oft-changing whims, my mom routinely made sacrifices for other people. She cared for her dying mother when I was a baby. She went to work so my dad could get a master’s degree…then a Ph.D….then another. And from the moment my sister and I arrived on the scene, her life never stopped revolving around the two of us.

I’m lucky for getting the parents I got. I inherited a hybrid version of their complementary personalities, a balance that works fairly well. But now I have also become heir to an uncanny set of circumstances leading to my own early awareness of mortality. The irony is bittersweet: In losing both my mom and dad, I can finally understand how their experiences shaped them—and how, in turn, they cultivated a passion for life, taught me to appreciate its richness and its mystery, and provided a blueprint for living gracefully and joyfully in the face of death.

Thank God. I’m going to need it. Because I’ve got shit to do.

Nearly two decades ago, when I stashed that encyclopedia under my bed, I sensed wisdom in its enigmatic pages. Today, the message is clear. All those florid mythologies and all those extra arms are just a fancy way of letting us in on the same secret: Life is an amazingly, terrifyingly precious thing—a truth only underscored by the fact that it does end so quickly. The trick is to notice this as often as possible while you’re still in it.

And I think that may just be what my palm has been trying to tell me all along.