We didn’t talk. Didn’t need to talk.
I cannot defeat cancer. Nobody defeats cancer. There is no winning or losing. There is no surviving or not surviving. There are only coin flips: heads or tails; benign or malignant; weight loss or bloating; morphine or oxycodone; extreme rescue efforts or Do Not Resuscitate; live or die.
We spend our lives with the person who has the same scars in the same places.
My white friends were visibly distressed by that loud singer and drummer. One of my friends, whom I shall call Tara, leaned forward and whispered, “I hate Indians.” My four other white friends gasped, but it took Tara a few moments to remember that she was sitting beside me, her Indian friend. She burst into tears and spent the rest of the night apologizing. “It’s okay,” I kept saying. But it wasn’t. I was hurt, ashamed, and angry.
But, like water falling drop by drop onto your face for hours and days and weeks, that tiny insults slowly came to have enormous power over me.
Love and death,” my father said. “It’s all love and death.
But my grandmother wanted us to forgive her murderer.
He was a white man and, therefore, he was allowed to be romantic.
Because someone needs to help you die the right way,” she said. “And we both know that dying ain’t something you ever done before.
But God has a way of making things even out, I guess.
I wasn’t there when the old Indian man from Worley said it, but I know it must be true: Every highway in the world crosses some reservation, cuts it in half.
But it happens mostly because “being American” means “being white,” even for a brown boy like me.
Ah, friend, this world – this one universe – Is already too expansive for me. When I die, let my mourners know That I shrugged at the possibility Of other universes. Hire a choir – Let them tell the truth But tell it choral – Let the assembled voices sing About my theology: I’m the fragile and finite mortal Who wanted no part of immortality. 27.
Or maybe I could have anesthetized myself with homework and extra credit and binge-reading.
What scares me least? The Afterlife. Really. Who cares? I’m going to be a good person no matter what is supposed to happen after I die.
Am I defined by what I’ve seen, or do I define the world by what I’ve witnessed? O, what beautiful or terrible thing waits around the next corner? Who isn’t in love with this mystery?
Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read?
If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there’s nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?
Sometimes you don’t something is true until you hear it for the first time.
Poverty was our spirit animal.