The morning after winning Emmys for being the producer and star of VEEP, Julia Louis-Dreyfus said that her doctor called to tell her she had breast cancer. She said, “I howled with laughter, which turned into hysterical crying. I mean, it’s a blow.”

Now cancer free, she was asked, does the “keen awareness of the dearness of life last?” She replied:

No. It comes and goes. But once you’ve walked through a life-threatening illness, there’s this little nagging thing with you all the time. That fear doesn’t completely go away because you’ve been face to face with it. But you know what? We walk through our lives so oblivious to the fact that our lives are going to end. We really don’t consider that. Ever. Almost ever. Maybe that’s a good thing. But it’s a cold, hard fact, and it is a strange thing to reconcile.