This Life's Torri Higginson: 'Fear of death is fear of living'

Torri Higginson has learned to console a lot of strangers over the past year. Viewers of the CBC drama This Life, which premiered last Oct., have come to love and relate to Higginson's character Natalie, a lifestyle columnist who is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

"With this show, it's happened to me on a few occasions where somebody just comes and sits down beside me and starts talking to me about their mother in the hospital and what she's going through," Higginson tells Palmater. "This one woman started crying, on the streetcar, but two to five minutes into this conversation I'm just sitting there listening going, 'I don't know you…' and she didn't realize she didn't know me."

Now entering its second season, This Life continues to follow Natalie's journey in making the most of life in the face of death, one that Higginson describes as "full of hope and positivity and faith."

This attitude has permeated Higginson's own outlook on life as she now meditates on her mortality on a daily basis which is admittedly both profound and exhausting sometimes. "We only live in the present when we're told that time is finite," Higginson reveals. "Fear of death is fear of living."

The second season of This Life premieres Sunday.