When you live with a potentially life-threatening condition you get used to the thought of dying. You accept it, you push on. The thing that scared me was the picture of dying slowly and painfully, the loss of independence and identity to illness.
The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or ...
If I would have known I was going to leave my job that day to become a writer, I probably would have planned differently... It didn't come by way of illness per se, accident, or dismissal, but by way of sheer self-mutiny. The self I was born to be, d...
When someone says so-and-so’s opinionated, what’s that mean? Aren’t we all opinionated? Show me one person with no opinions, and I’ll show you a bowl of Jell-O—or a politician, whichever one’s dumber.
When I want to feel productive, I box up my stuff—and then unpack everything. With my work ethic, and my unethical nature, I think I’d make a perfect politician.
The cops came by and said my nemesis had been poisoned, shot, stabbed, beaten, hung, drowned, and subjected to Gilbert Gottfried’s voice at a high decibel level. “Ah,” I said, “so you suspect his death was a suicide.
My heart leaves, hitchhikes right out of my body, heads north, catches a ferry across the Bering Sea and plants itself in Siberia with the polar bears and ibex and long-horned goats until it turns into a teeny-tiny glacier. Because I imagined it.
We don't need to have the answers. We'll never have them. They'll come and go and change. And all we can do is figure out the best way to behave when life comes at us. Even if society says it isn't right. Right is so subjective, after all.
If I'm in this war, too, then I should be upset. You know I'm not the type to think collecting bacon grease and scrap metal will keep anyone from dying. How about you give me the words so you don't have to hold them in? It's the least I can do.
This is the story of how Dad lived with his lung cancer. But it is much more. Through his illness and the miracles we experienced, I came to see that Dad's was not just a journey. It was a journey home. Home to God.
Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving.... AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. It is simply an opportunistic vi...
Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties…Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, le...
The home world exercises its siren call over us all. No matter how far we wander, or how long we are gone, it waits patiently. And when we return to it, as we must, it sings to us. We came out of its forests, waded ashore from its seas. It is in our ...
They were uncertain, resentful, and somewhat ill at ease. This they hid by pretending an elaborate relief at being out of the army, and by assuring each other that military discipline should never again rule their stubborn, liberty-loving wills. Yet,...
An opportunity lost may have motivated us to find a satisfying alternative. Adversity or suffering may have taught us certain important skills. Some writers have felt new appreciation for their lives after surviving a serious illness or disability. A...
Perhaps once in a lifetime we meet someone who has the ability to inspire us in one brief meeting, who can confront not one but two life-threatening illnesses with remarkable courage – and instil hope in others in the face of the greatest adversity...
What! your wisdom thinks I must love the man I'm going to marry? The most unpleasant thing in the world. I should quarrel with him; I should be jealous of him; our menage would be conducted in a very ill-bred manner. A little quiet contempt contribut...
Whenever anyone harbored ill will toward the beast or said he'd got what he deserved, the spell increased and the evil grew stronger and stronger in the gargoyle. It became more and more difficult for people to forgive-and love-not only the beast, bu...
Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them g...
The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles...
If we can accept the fact that we create illness, it follows naturally that we can also create wellness. And therein lies a most empowering nugget of truth and healing.
