Tag: illness

“As medicine advances, we have more survivors. But those survivors carry trauma to their graves.”

Paraic O’Donnell chronicles the progression of his MS with clarity, beauty, wit, and no small amount of sadness. Picking the most striking paragraph in this essay full of them is a fool’s errand.

Andrea J. Buchanan contemplates the way illness and pain can freeze a sufferer in time, as if encased in glass.

This month’s books newsletter is a bodily affair.

Colin Dickey remembers a departed friend and a tree that won’t die.

Nearly a third of all US federal prisons are located within three miles of a Superfund site; 134 are located within one mile.

As the daughter of a funeral director, Jodie Briggs thought she knew all about death. Then her dad almost died.

In her essay “This Imaginary Half-Nothing: Time” (#10 on this list), poet Anne Boyer quotes another poet, John Donne: “We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew, and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a […]

Time for me is double-edged: Every day brings me further from the low of my last cancer relapse, but every day also brings me closer to the next cancer recurrence — and eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The […]

Like advanced directives for the dying, DuBrul explained, mad maps allow psychiatric patients to outline what they’d like their care to look like in future mental health crises. The logic is: If a person can define health, while healthy, and differentiate health from crisis, that person can shape his or her own care. The maps […]

A woman recovering from a kidney transplant finds solace in poetry: I began with C.K. Williams’s ‘Dream’ (‘Mad dreams! Mad love!’) and ended with Kyger’s ‘[He is pruning the privet]’: ‘You are not alone is this world / not a lone a parallel world of reflection / in a window keeps the fire burning.’ In […]