At the end of "Some Women," what does the narrator mean when she says " The carnality at death's door--or the true love, for that matter...."?

The narrator of "Some Women" in Munro's collection of
short stories, Too Much Happiness, is an older
woman telling her reminiscence of a summer job she held in 1940 when she was age 13.
This vulnerable age sees much but also fails to understand much that is seen, as
experience is still veiled by innocence (at least in earlier eras it
was).

Her employer is Mrs. Crozier whose son--who lives upstairs with
his educated wife, Sylvia--is dying of leukemia. Understandably, at this point in his
life, physical passion is not a preeminent part of his experience. Mrs. Crozier doesn't
like Sylvia and blames her--along with the rest of the town--for teaching summer school
instead of staying home with her dying husband.

Enter Roxanne, a
rather sexy and vain woman hired to give Mrs. Crozier massages. A wicked plan hatches
between the two of them to turn Mr. Crozier's affections against Sylvia through an
attempt at renewing the dying man's physical passions via Roxanne’s
ministrations.

It is in this context that the narrator says of her
younger self that:

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The carnality at death's door--or the true love,
for that matter--were things I had to shake off like shivers down my
spine.

Here, she is
expressing her surprise and shock ("shivers down my spine") at observing how base and
carnal (i.e., physical) selfish individuals, like Roxanne, could be when standing in the
face of death: Impending death should be the one overriding consideration, yet physical
pleasure could demand that death be forgotten. The narrator observed the same about the
forces of true love, like Sylvia's, in the face of death with the same surprise and
shock. In other words, to the narrator's 13-year-old mind, nothing selfish-seeming
should come before a person's impending death in importance.