About one million Americans have cirrhosis and don't know it.  When they are told "You have cirrhosis, I'm sorry but we have no treatment", the future that they imagined lay before them dies.  It is, in a very real way, a death of self. 

We all know that we will one day die but we hold a sense of how we think or hope our future will unfold.  There is a continuity that flows with the preceding events in our lives as a single journey. If you have no warning, as so many liver disease patients do not, and your first information is that you have cirrhosis, a probably terminal illness, the self that you have known dies.  The life you thought you were living no longer exists and a new unbidden and unwanted future is before you and you must find a way to reconcile yourself with that new reality.