Tag Archives: death

Inescapable

I’m in a study carrel at the University of Michigan library, and I want to scream and cry and kick the four walls of my enclosure.   Yesterday during a break from class I opened up my New York Times … Continue reading

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“How are you?” *punchface*

   A question a cancer patient can’t answer.   The problem with providing answers or ”updates” is that our conditions are mysteries to us too. We don’t know what’s couched in our bodies, or where, or when it will rear up again. People want to … Continue reading

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Dying Young

I shall live to be old, who feared I should die young     I shall live to be old. I shall cling to life as the leaves cling to the creaking oak     In the rustle of the falling snow … Continue reading

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15 July 2009: the Lord preserves the young ones

The sick cloud of the final chemo—I can hardly write or fathom the date. Barely able to function in this sick, spinning state. Unable to speak coherently to my mother—having caught me in the library, demanding a date to book … Continue reading

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13 July 2009: Insomnia

2 AM—steroid insomnia Or insomnia of another sort of course Statistics & mastectomy pictures Reconstruction, Tamoxifen, Michigan Bankruptcy, relationship, religion, Jack the Ripper, gender/secondary sex characteristics, the Bodleian, Haworth, Wuthering Heights, Simone de Beauvoir, ‘writer’s block,’ the emptiness, Mastectomy, my … Continue reading

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9 July 2009: Why is there not a discovery in life?

Another bout of this, a day wasted, hours and hours in bed, wet pillowcase. Pain in my armpit. The inability to do anything–and those horrible lines from Love Story, a movie I haven’t even seen, but which has somehow pervaded … Continue reading

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7 July 2009: an ache

These dreams wherin everything is out of joint. Trying to take the Tube to impossible destinations, unfamiliar geographies. And a slapdash wedding, bald and ugly, the wrong flowers, no guests. Everything is wrong; I can feel it. Pain in my … Continue reading

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4 July 2009: a “lived” hieroglyph?

I’d forgotten what a blessed thing Saturday mornings in the Radcliffe Camera are. In Oxford I am always possible–grateful and humbled to have been in some small part at home in this great tradition of knowledge. I’d come into town with … Continue reading

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2 July 2009: die happy

Another horrible dream several nights ago of perpetual pursuit and eventual death–waiting for the poison to work to its purpose like Act V of Hamlet, and desperately wishing there were something to say to K., something to express love that … Continue reading

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this living hand

  This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart … Continue reading

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