From patient to purpose: How a cancer diagnosis creates existential liminality to motivate crafting for work-related generativity.

where people grapple with tensions of time and meaning, reflecting on what is meaningful in paid and unpaid work within an unknowable mortal timeline. When people have the cognitive space to engage in this process (i.e., when demands are manageable and resources are sufficient), existential liminality can catalyze crafting for generativity across paid and unpaid work. This work extends work-life shock events theory by revealing existential liminality as a unique sensemaking process that differs meaningfully from the identity-focused processes this theory describes. We also challenge the dominant death anxiety-based paradigm in the death awareness research by centering death reflection, a positive but undertheorized pathway with significant consequences for how people invest in work activities. Confronting death, we find, can prompt people to pursue a positive, lasting impact on others through work-related crafting for generativity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).