To Live or Die?

I tend to give the impression that I'm taking this all in my stride...as it were...and that I have everything in control, but although physically I'm getting by, mentally I'm here there and everywhere. One of my main issues is that I think about death and dying a lot, every day infact. I'm not sitting around moping or being depressed or anything like that, infact you'd never know what I was thinking to speak to me. My main worry about dying is not the actual dying, its the leaving behind that seems so hard. Perhaps this is something that happens to you once you become a parent, and is a consequence of being older and should I say wiser? Of course I'm not planning to go anywhere anytime soon, its just my own mortality has come running up behind me and hit me slap in the face, and its a huge shock. One thing I remember very very strongly and tend to dwell on, is a terribly sad story that I heard at Christmas time. It concerned a woman who had fallen from her loft retrieving her presents for her children, broken her neck and died. She lay there undisturbed with only her toddlers around her until Boxing Day. This story upsets me and troubles me no end because anyone who knows my propensity for falling about the place will know that I keep thinking this could have been me. I think of this woman every single day, I don't know anything about her, who she was or what her name was, but I still give her and her family a thought on a daily basis. What makes it that I am here, and she is not? How can we reconcile ourselves to this? Do some of us have more worthwhile lives, things that we must do? Do we all have an allotted time maybe? Is it luck, fate or something else?