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Disability
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.
September 1999Sacraments
A sacrament is physical, and within it is God’s love; as a sandwich is physical, and nutritious and pleasurable, and within it is love, if someone makes it for you and gives it to you with love: even harried or tired or impatient love, but with love’s direction and concern, love’s again-and-again wavering and distorted focus on goodness, then God’s love, too, is in the sandwich.
July 1999And There Was Light
I felt indescribable relief and a happiness so great it almost made me laugh. Confidence and gratitude came as if a prayer had been answered. I found light and joy at the same moment, and I can say without hesitation that from that time on light and joy have never been separate in my experience. I have had them or lost them together.
February 1999A Day In The Life Of Ann
Ann is lying on her left side in the hospital bed in the living room. Joe has just gone to work. Before leaving, he helped me turn her and take off her impractical frilly nightgown. He wants her dressed normally, though she’s way beyond caring. Now I’m watching TV, waiting for the suppository I gave her to work.
February 1999In The Name Of Compassion
A Lawyer Fights Assisted Suicide — An Interview With Wesley J. Smith
A proponent of assisted suicide could be Moses, and it wouldn’t make assisted suicide right. That said, I think the motives of those promoting this agenda are mixed. I think there is a difference between the true believers in assisted suicide, who view it in an almost quasi-religious way, and people who support it because they believe it is the compassionate thing to do. The latter are merely misguided, in my opinion.
February 1999Where Silence Starts
Imagining motherhood is like imagining old age: there are no reliable forecasts. I assumed I would know more. While pregnant, I supposed that mothers’ intuition was a hard, certain thing, a perpetually replenished reservoir of basic instinct.
March 1998Waiting
At the door, Laura turned and smiled. “I’ll be right back,” she said. Dash was out the door already, pulling the leash taut. David had a last-minute impulse to get up and take the dog himself, but he didn’t. And so it was Laura at the edge of the road when the car shot out of the cool night, drawn like a missile to her heat.
February 1998
