Mary Wang recalls the ways in which she and her family in China conspired to hide her grandmother’s cancer diagnosis from her.
illness
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 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Doctor with Terminal Cancer Writes to His Baby Daughter
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 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Can ‘Mad Maps’ Offer Patients a Way to Take Charge of Their Psychiatric Care?
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 […]
Posted inUncategorized
Finding Poetry in Illness
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 […]
Posted inUncategorized
Finding Poetry in Illness
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 […]