January 08, 2003 | 2:10 PM

Last night a close friend of mine�s sister died suddenly and without warning. She was in her early twenties. She�d had health problems since she was born but her passing was completely unexpected.

You just never know. Her family is devastated and my heart aches for them�especially her mother who was very very close to her. I can�t imagine what it would be like to lose a child�losing a parent is difficult enough.

This brings me back again to what I was thinking yesterday before I found out this news. All of the silly petty things we focus on are so meaningless when placed at the edge of a grave.

Many things that have happened over the past year have made me remember the lesson of Our Town, one of the finest and most misunderstood plays of the 20th century American cannon. I directed a production of it when I was eighteen years old, and yesterday I read the third act, where Emily, recently deceased returns to relive her 12th birthday over again and realizes just how much she hadn�t noticed.

Emily: I can�t. I can�t go on. It goes so fast. We don�t have time to look at one another. I didn�t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back � up the hill � to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by. Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover�s Corners�Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking�and Mama�s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you�re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? � every, every minute? No�I should have listened to you. That�s all human being are! Just blind people.

Simon Stimson: Yes, now you know. Now you know! That�s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those�of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know � that�s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.

One of my most important resolutions this year is to take more care�in observation, in sifting out the meaningful from the meaningless, and with the feelings of others. To try and be gentle and compassionate both to myself and loved ones.

Because tomorrow morning me or you or you could be carried away in a hearse. And I don�t want to be a ghost wandering the past with the terrible realization that I focused on nonsense and missed the divine.