LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – When Canadian author Mark Daniels arrived in Lake Tahoe in 2022, he had already decided it would be the place where he would spend his final days.

“I lived my life believing I had a time stamp on me, that I would expire 65 days short of my 53rd birthday,” Daniels said. “I figured, if I’m going to die, I want to be in heaven on Earth before I go. So I chose one of the most beautiful places on Earth, Lake Tahoe.”

Daniels’ belief in his early death began after he lost his father to Pick’s disease, a rare progressive brain disorder that can have a hereditary component. But Daniels chose not to undergo genetic testing.

“If I would have gotten tested and was told yes, how would I have conducted my life for the next 20 years?” he said. “Would I have lived more of a rebel? Would I have lived more cautiously? So I went by the premise of, let’s rely on modern medicine. Twenty years is a long time.”

For two decades, however, Daniels lived with the belief that he would meet the same fate as his father and die just shy of his 53rd birthday.

As that predicted date approached, Daniels increasingly withdrew from the world around him. Paradise existed just outside his windows, but inside, he was preparing for an ending he had feared for decades.

“A lot of my time in Tahoe was spent with the blinds closed,” Daniels said. “I’d only go out for groceries and to take a walk to the cannabis dispensary.”

Then the date came and went; and nothing happened. The hourglass Daniels had spent so much of his life watching had been wrong.

“Tahoe ultimately became something completely different from the place I thought I had chosen to die,” Daniels said. “It became the place where I began understanding how badly I wanted to live.”

In his memoir, The Hourglass Was Lying: A Memoir of Borrowed Time, Daniels reflects on how living under the belief that his life had an expiration date shaped nearly every part of his existence; from his relationships and career to the way he understood time itself.

Twenty years may sound like a long time, Daniels said. But living those years with the belief that they were numbered changed his perspective on what it means to truly live.

“If there is anything people can get out of this, don’t live your life under a thumb,” Daniels said. “Live beautifully.”