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Photographs By Art Myers

I am still haunted by the memory of the phone call from my mother telling me in a trembling voice that my sister Joanne, still in her thirties, had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Following a prolonged, heroic battle to survive, she was eventually to die from that disease. Two decades later, I anxiously faced a surgeon in an antiseptic hospital waiting room as he uttered the dreaded words “Your wife has breast cancer.”

Strange Places

A toilet paper roll, a tiny red metal bicycle, an out-of-body experience

Body Bright

No matter how much we camouflage or medicate them, our bodies remain wild, bright sparks from the great encompassing wildness, perfectly made for savoring and exploring this sensuous planet; and that is a source of hope.

Sunbeams

The harder we look at our aches and ailments, the more we will be startled by the painful truths they are trying to convey about our dangerously disembodied way of life.

Marion Woodman

Five Unusual Things I Saw At Doctor McVee’s The Summer I Turned Nine

An off-duty fireman who had sawed a fifty-five-gallon drum in half to make a double barbecue pit, then by accident had tipped one of the halves over with hot coals. The barrel had pinned his bare feet to his deck and broiled them.

Saint Ursula And Her Maidens

You have a zygote — “Zoe Zachary Zygote,” your husband calls it — and the world is fuzzy and mint green, soft as lamb’s ear. And your health is much improved. After all those dark days, you have suddenly plunged into Candyland. The trees blossom with caramel apples; the sun shines its Creamsicle rays especially for you.

A Good Enough Daughter

I was hopeful as I drove my parents’ snow-covered car from their house in Shaker Heights to the Judson Park Retirement Community, where they now resided, at the edge of downtown Cleveland. After several months, Judson still seemed satisfactory to me.

Mother Vs. Polio, 1944

A Rage To Live

An Interview With Leonard Kriegel

I think crippled is the best word because it’s the most accurate. As a writer, I think language is supposed to be strong and definitive, and should speak of what is. Even the sound of crippled tells you something. It has a harshness about it that speaks to the condition. The writer’s job is to communicate an experience, and when you abstract from it with terms like “differently abled,” there’s no way you can communicate the pain of not being able to use your legs and the rage that is an inevitable concomitant of that pain.

Falling Into Life

Over the past five years, as I have moved into the solidity of middle age, I have become aware of a surprising need for symmetry. I am possessed by a peculiar passion: I want to believe that my life will balance out. And because I once had to learn to fall in order to keep this life mine, I now seem to have convinced myself that I must also learn to fall into death.