Learning to ride, falling down, getting back on
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I want to help carry the burden when it is heaviest. The dying patients and their families need time with a compassionate stranger: someone they don’t have to expend their fragile energy to try to support or protect.
This was what it was like to do the work she did, to recognize the person in the dying body and to stay with them — like bearing witness to light moving through wreckage, stubborn and pure.
When did the distance from the bed to here become twenty-six miles? That pair of pants I stepped over, you see that? Goddamn Everest that was.
I imagine my own daughter in Danny’s situation. She is a toddler, so I would be allowed to stay with her if she got COVID. But if she were older, what would I do? What rules would I break to sit beside her?
Featuring Michael Meade, Pema Chödrön, Peter A. Selwyn, and more.
Diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone. Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
Diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
The little button lying in my hand brought the violent history of the place to life. For a moment war wasn’t just pictures in textbooks. I could feel the residue of it, the half-life of violence.