If there is one thing I’ve learned while doing the business of death, it’s that it comes as a surprise, even in hospice.
She especially liked the way his big hands cradled her head, as if he could hold her thoughts together even when they started running off in directions she didn’t want to explore.
I hope he can make it through this first night in an empty house, which is always the worst. If my clients are afraid of dying, then my clients’ caregivers fear being alone. There is something bleak and barren about a world that is missing the person who knows you best.
It’s not just sight and sound that are ratcheted up, either. My skin is so sensitive that I can tell you whether my shirt is cotton or polyester just by its temperature against my back. I have to cut all the labels out of my clothes so they don’t rub because they feel like coarse sandpaper. If someone touches me when I am not expecting it, I scream – not out of fear but because it sometimes feels like my nerve endings are on the outside rather than the inside.
The thing that contains the burning incense in a Catholic church is called a thurible. The rising smoke is supposed to symbolize the prayers of believers rising up to heaven. The word incense comes from a Greek word. Originally it meant sacrifice. It’s no wonder one of the Magi brought it as a gift. Gold and myrrh were powerful presents, I’m sure. But the king who brought frankincense to that child knew full well that the world would take its toll. My least.
Imagine all the times you’ve told yourself, Oh, it’s nothing. Well, nothing can be pretty goddamned big.
Is everything that happened to me before the age of seventeen really going to be the most important thing about me for the next seventy?
This is what I tell myself: that we were inevitable. That it was meant to be.
He grunts, the only sound he’ll make in his life.
The fact that it’s complicated – that there’s a whole spectrum of ways of being in the world – is what makes it a blessing.
I sometimes wonder which of my prehistoric ancestors first stuck his arm into a hole in a tree. Did he come out with a handful of honey, or a fistful of stings? Is the promise of one worth the risk of the other?
When trans people tell the truth about who they are, they face stigma, discrimination, harassment, and in some cases, violence,” Dr. Powers says bluntly. “Trans people have been fired for expressing their gender identity. They’ve been beaten up or thrown out of their homes. Last year, nearly thirty trans people were murdered. This year, so far, another four have been killed.
Bucket lists aren’t important. Benchmarks aren’t important. Neither are goals. You take the wins in small ways: Did I wake up this morning? Do I have a roof over my head? Are the people I care about doing okay? You don’t need the things you don’t have. You only need what you’ve got, and the rest? It’s just gravy.
Schubert Arpeggione Sonata.
I feel, for just a moment, a pang of jealousy. Why does he get a free pass, every time; why am I always judged?
I know parents with more than one kid say they love the kids equally, but I don’t believe it. I think it is the same in the other direction. A kid will say they love both their parents the same amount, but when there’s a rough edge, sometimes that ragged border fits flush against one parent, and prickles against the other. I just wish, sometimes, I could be the one she loves more.
But it is exactly because I was a writer that I could never do it. The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers. What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet?
Other than that, he didn’t much see how the punishment would differ: a life sentence that made the limits of your world a prison, or the prison your world became when your sentence was simply to live.
I’d much rather have had a few great years with him than none at all.
So maybe there’s a reason she keeps you at a distance. You can’t grieve something if you don’t let yourself get close enough to care.
No one’s ever thought the worst of me before,” he says, and he picks the queen cage up from where it is balanced against the side of the transport box. “Now I kind of feel like this. Boxed in. Like I’ve got nobody.