Literary Las Vegas: Mathias B. Freese

Henderson author Mathias B. Freese explores varied topics in "This Möbius Strip of Ifs," an Indie Excellence Book Awards-winning collection of essays and memoir. Written over four decades, the book walks readers through his life as a writer, psychotherapist, spiritual seeker and teacher. Essays documenting his career encouraging high school students and therapy patients to wake up to life stand alongside writings about the Holocaust and his daughter's suicide. Reflections on books, film and Las Vegas provide lighter fare.

Freese is also the author of "The i Tetralogy," a Holocaust novel, winner of the Allbooks Review Editor's Choice Award, and "Down to a Sunless Sea," a collection of short fiction, and a finalist for the Indie Excellence Book Awards.

Recently Freese's second short story collection, "I Truly Lament," a finalist in the 2012 Leapfrog Fiction Contest, was picked up by Dzanc Books.

For more on the author, visit mathiasbfreese.com.

Excerpt from 'This Möbius Strip of Ifs'

I don't know if she left an estate, probably not. What she did leave was a personal estate, riches of another kind. For me, as a person, as her therapist, she gave something of value. By her life, her presence, her modest but really immodest example, she confirmed what I am sharing with you.

So, order your life so that when you come to your end those about you will have the dearest memories of a life well-lived and expressed, a life well-invested solely in the potential and worth of others.

So, order your life so that probate is only the mechanics dealing with one of life's necessary realities, but not the indelible memory of a significant other.

Perhaps the best inheritance you can give to close ones is the way in which you lived, as opposed to how well you saved and planned.

We cannot have it all, however un-American, during life, after life. What is obtainable is the intangible, if worked at - the imprint, the impression you make on others, perhaps what we mean as the soul. In a corporate state this has no value. So, choose.