“As medicine advances, we have more survivors. But those survivors carry trauma to their graves.”
illness
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Highlight, Quotes
How Do You Live In a Body That Doesn’t Feel Like Yours? If You Have No Choice, You Just Do.
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.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
Surviving the Shattering of My Mind and My Marriage
Andrea J. Buchanan contemplates the way illness and pain can freeze a sufferer in time, as if encased in glass.
Posted inBooks
This Month in Books: ‘I Don’t Want To Become a Giant Insect!’
This month’s books newsletter is a bodily affair.
Posted inEditor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
The Leaves, They Never Stop Falling
Colin Dickey remembers a departed friend and a tree that won’t die.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Ten Translations of Care
Mary Wang recalls the ways in which she and her family in China conspired to hide her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis from her.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Prison: A Death Sentence by Poison
Nearly a third of all US federal prisons are located within three miles of a Superfund site; 134 are located within one mile.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
Growing Up Around Funeral Homes Didn’t Prepare Me for Death
As the daughter of a funeral director, Jodie Briggs thought she knew all about death. Then her dad almost died.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Hotel of Multiple Realities
In this personal essay, while recovering from an aneurysm, Emily Carter Roiphe discovers the hospital houses a series of alternate realms.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
The Mysteries and Truths of Illness: A Reading List
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 […]