The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
* * *
An essay about dealing with stage IV cancer and developing coping techniques.

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2014. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.
If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…

Adele Oliveira | Longreads | Nov. 2014 | 15 minutes (3,798 words)

Belle Boggs | The New New South | August 2013 | 62 minutes (15,377 words)
Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)
We’re proud to present, for the first time online, “For the Public Good,” Belle Boggs‘s story for The New New South about the shocking history of forced sterilizations that occurred in the United States, and the story of victims in North Carolina, with original video by Olympia Stone.
As Boggs explained to us last year:
“Last summer I met Willis Lynch, a man who was sterilized by the state of North Carolina more than 65 years earlier, when he was only 14 years old and living in an institution for delinquent children. Willis was one of 7,600 victims of North Carolina’s eugenics program, and one of the more outspoken and persistent advocates for compensation.
“At the time I was struggling with my own inability to conceive, and the debate within my state—how much is the ability to have children worth?—was something I thought about a lot. It’s hard to quantify, the value of people who don’t exist. It gets even more complicated when you factor in public discomfort over a shameful past, and a present-day political climate that marginalizes the poor.”
Thanks to Boggs and The New New South for sharing this story with the Longreads Community, and thanks to Longreads Members for your helping us bring these stories to you. Join us.

The sorrow and anger that followed Kate’s death, however, pale next to the terrible yearning. “Sometimes I feel panic sweeping over me,” I wrote to a friend, “and I’m so overwhelmed with yearning for Kate that I don’t know how I’ll manage.”
I searched for “yearning” and “grief” on the Internet and found a Harvard Medical School study that concluded yearning after a loss is far more debilitating than sadness or depression. The study included people who had lost a husband or wife, a parent, or a brother or sister. I wrote the author, Dr. Holly Prigerson at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, to ask why parents who had lost children weren’t included. Losing a child, she told me, is so many “orders of magnitude worse” that it couldn’t be meaningfully compared to other losses.
On his third birthday without Kate, Steve and I were standing in our kitchen, crying, when he choked out these words: “It’s not that I want her back. It’s not that I need her back. It’s that I have to have her back.”
–Nancy Comiskey, in Indianapolis Monthly, on what she learned about grieving, 10 years after the death of her daughter.

Rebecca Solnit | Orion | Summer 2014 | 20 minutes (4,780 words)
OrionOur latest Longreads Exclusive comes from Rebecca Solnit and Orion magazine—subscribe to the magazine or donate for more great stories like this.Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks)
The word “journey” used to mean a single day’s travels, and the French word for day, jour, is packed neatly inside it, like a single pair of shoes in a very small case. Maybe all journeys should be imagined as a single day, short as a trip to the corner or long as a life in its ninth decade. This way of thinking about it is a;rmed by the t-shirts made for African-American funerals in New Orleans and other places that describe the birth date and death date of the person being commemorated as sunrise and sunset. One day. Read more…

–Tiffany Stanley, in National Journal, offers a heartbreaking first-person account of caring for her aunt, who had Alzheimer’s disease.
Photo courtesy The Stanley Family

— In Vanity Fair, Merrill Markoe profiled her friend Sam Simon, a co-creator of the Simpsons who was diagnosed with terminal cancer two years ago. He lived the only way he knew how: with good humor and by dedicating his life to philanthropic causes.
Sam Simon died today at the age of 59.
Photo: Mercy for Anim
Sam Simon, a co-creator of The Simpsons and a writer and a producer for Taxi and Cheers, was diagnosed with terminal cancer two years ago. He’s been dealing with it by working on philanthropic causes and spending time with close friends and loved ones.
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