Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  O the last weekend in March, she gives her blessing. That’s five weeks from now, she thinks. Who’s to say what will happen in the next five weeks? He’s made his wishes clear. No more treatment. Palliative care only. Don’t try to extend his life. He’s had a good run. Thirty-five fantastic years with you, my love. When he says that, she dissolves. She can’t bear the idea of losing him. “You’re strong,” he tells her. “Not anymore.” “I need you to be strong.” She nods. For him she’ll do anything. If he needs her to be strong, she’ll be strong. “I never expected to make it to eighty,” he says. “And I’m not talking about cancer. I expected God to strike me down for wanting you.” She smiles. “Arthur, you’re becoming religious in your old age?” “I’ve always been religious deep down. I never wanted to hurt anyone, not even when I was drilling a tooth.” She kisses him. “Is it any wonder I love you?” “No funeral,” he reminds her for the tenth time. —NONE OF THEM KNOWS if Natalie will show up for his early birthday party, but at the last minute, she does. She brings fifteen-year-old Ruby with her, the youngest of her three children, each by a different father. She’s never seen the point of marriage. They stay in a two-bedroom suite at Caesars Palace, arranged by Christina. A car and driver are at Natalie’s disposal, delivering her and young Ruby to Miri’s house for Dr. O’s party. It’s a sunny afternoon, warm enough to set up the buffet on the deck. Eliza hits it off with Ruby Renso. “What exactly is our relationship?” Miri hears Ruby ask Eliza. Eliza answers, “Well…your grandfather is married to my grandmother. That must make us something-in-laws.” “Yes,” Ruby says. “Something-in-laws.” Before sunset Eliza and Ruby come to her. “Mom,” Eliza says with more enthusiasm than Miri has heard in ages, “Ruby’s invited me to Santa Fe for the summer.” “Actually,” Ruby says, “we live on a spread in Tesuque, outside of Santa Fe.” “Can I go?” Eliza begs. “Please…” Miri has to think fast. “Let me talk to Natalie about this and see what we can work out.” “Does that mean yes?” Ruby asks Eliza. Eliza says, “It means We’ll see. ” “Great!” Ruby says. “At least it doesn’t mean no!” Miri laughs. So do Malcolm and Kenny. “She’s going to be okay, Mom,” Kenny says of Eliza. “I hope so,” Miri says. “At least we didn’t give you any trouble,” Malcolm says. “Right, Kenny? We were perfect children.” Ha! Miri remembers the pot plants in the closet, the acid trip to the mountains, the fake IDs falling out of Kenny’s wallet when they were stopped by the police on their way to hear the Grateful Dead. But they’ve made it through. They’re good young men. When the trio begins to play “It Had to Be You,” Dr.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  I was devastated. For three months, all I consumed were bottles of Jameson and a single box of cornflakes—a small handful a day, and even that made me nauseated. I lost so much weight that my ribs formed a stepladder, my vertebrae sharp shells pushing dangerously out from beneath my skin. But I thought I fixed this problem, I muttered to myself all day long. I thought I became a nice girl. I picked and picked at my memories, trying to figure out how, despite my best efforts, the horrible, rotten core at the center of myself managed to get past my defenses and worm its way out.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  One evening in my third year, I ran into Jeff, my friend in general surgery, a similarly intense and demanding profession. We each noted the other’s despondency. “You go first,” he said. And I described the death of a child, shot in the head for wearing the wrong color shoes, but he had been so close to making it…Amid a recent spate of fatal, inoperable brain tumors, my hopes had been pinned on this kid pulling through, and he hadn’t. Jeff paused, and I awaited his story. Instead, he laughed, punched me in the arm, and said, “Well, I guess I learned one thing: if I’m ever feeling down about my work, I can always talk to a neurosurgeon to cheer myself up.” Driving home later that night, after gently explaining to a mother that her newborn had been born without a brain and would die shortly, I switched on the radio; NPR was reporting on the continuing drought in California. Suddenly, tears were streaming down my face. Being with patients in these moments certainly had its emotional cost, but it also had its rewards. I don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness. Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight. — Midway through residency, time is set aside for additional training. Perhaps unique in medicine, the ethos of neurosurgery—of excellence in all things—maintains that excellence in neurosurgery alone is not enough. In order to carry the field, neurosurgeons must venture forth and excel in other fields as well. Sometimes this is very public, as in the case of the neurosurgeon-journalist Sanjay Gupta, but most often the doctor’s focus is on a related field. The most rigorous and prestigious path is that of the neurosurgeon-neuroscientist.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  Dr. Jones was asleep when the phone rang. It was 5 A.M. and on the phone was a detective telling her she should drive to Washington. Rocky was in the hospital. Rocky had been shot. She drove with her daughter. She was sure he was still alive. She paused several times as she explained this. She went directly to the ICU. Rocky was not there. A group of men with authority—doctors, lawyers, detectives, perhaps—took her into a room and told her he was gone. She paused again. She did not cry. Composure was too important now. “It was unlike anything I had felt before,” she told me. “It was extremely physically painful. So much so that whenever a thought of him would come to mind, all I could do was pray and ask for mercy. I thought I was going to lose my mind and go crazy. I felt sick. I felt like I was dying.” I asked if she expected that the police officer who had shot Prince would be charged. She said, “Yes.” Her voice was a cocktail of emotions. She spoke like an American, with the same expectations of fairness, even fairness belated and begrudged, that she took into medical school all those years ago. And she spoke like a black woman, with all the pain that undercuts those exact feelings. I now wondered about her daughter, who’d been recently married. There was a picture on display of this daughter and her new husband. Dr. Jones was not optimistic. She was intensely worried about her daughter bringing a son into America, because she could not save him, she could not secure his body from the ritual violence that had claimed her son. She compared America to Rome. She said she thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others. “And we can’t get the message,” she said. “We don’t understand that we are embracing our deaths.” I asked Dr. Jones if her mother was still alive. She told me her mother passed away in 2002, at the age of eighty-nine. I asked Dr. Jones how her mother had taken Prince’s death, and her voice retreated into an almost-whisper, and Dr. Jones said, “I don’t know that she did.”

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Title : The Great Believers Author: Makkai, Rebecca ASIN : B076GPPLPP [image file=Image00005.jpg] Praise for The Great Believers “Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers is a page turner. . . . Among the first novels to chronicle the AIDS epidemic from its initial outbreak to the present—among the first to convey the terrors and tragedies of the epidemic’s early years as well as its course and repercussions. . . . An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis.” —The New York Times Book Review “Compulsively readable . . . a relentless engine mowing back and forth across decades, zooming in on subtlest physical and emotional nuances of dozens of characters, missing no chance to remind us what’s at stake.” —San Francisco Chronicle “At turns heartbreaking and hopeful, the novel brings the first years of the AIDS epidemic into very immediate view, in a manner that will seem nostalgic to some and revelatory to others. . . . Makkai’s sweeping fourth novel shows the compassion of chosen families and the tension and distance that can exist in our birth ones.” —Library Journal “Time is a healer and a heartbreaker in Makkai’s brilliant and beautiful novel. The Great Believers kept me hoping and guessing, heart in hand, until the very last page.” —Carol Rifka Brunt, author of Tell the Wolves I’m Home “Cultural revolutions of the past painfully reverberate in Rebecca Makkai’s deft third novel, The Great Believers , which captures both the devastation of the AIDS crisis in 1980s Chicago and the emotional aftershocks of those losses.” —Vogue “Sure to become a classic Chicago novel . . . a deft, harrowing novel that’s as beautiful as its cover.” —Chicago Review of Books “The latest novel from the stunningly versatile Makkai . . . Focused on a group of friends, lovers, and family outcasts, the book highlights the way tragic illness shifts the courses of people’s lives—and how its touch forever lingers on those left behind.” —Harper’s Bazaar “In the remarkable The Great Believers , Rebecca Makkai conjures up a time as startling as a dream and, in its extremity, achingly familiar to us now, close enough to hold. A tender, sly, immersive, irreverent, life force of a book.” —Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship “A devastating contemplation of love and loss . . . evokes the epidemic’s horrors, yes, but also the profound acts of generosity it sparked.” —Oprah.com, “O’s Top Books of Summer” “Makkai has created a moving story about Chicago and Paris, the past and present, the young men lost to AIDS and the ones who survived. And just as her novel evokes art’s power to commemorate the departed, The Great Believers is itself a poignant work of memory.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer “Deeply moving . . .

• From Like Family

  “We haven’t told you when we’re going.” “I’m always busy.” She tipped Leather Rod to the side and the album slid out. Holding it gingerly, she blew on it several times, then placed it on the turntable. Lowered the needle. “Tonight’s the Night” started up, clearly our sign to leave, but Penny and I couldn’t stop looking at her incredulously. “What?” she finally barked. “What?” She put her hands on her knees and set her chin. “Listen, I just don’t want to go. You guys can make up your own minds, but leave me out of it.” [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] PENNY DRIED HER FACE on her sweater as we left the elevator after our spastic laugh attack. “Do I look normal?” she said, turning her attention to her stick-straight hair. “No. Do I?” “Nope.” The sixth floor was tiled in white and a yellow-orange Penny said was technically called “baby shit,” you know, in decorator’s terms. We wandered around lost for a while, but I wasn’t in a hurry. I needed the time to prepare myself for Keith’s injuries. Granny had warned us that he looked bad, and though I tried to call up versions of bad, the only thing coming in clearly was Keith at eight, feet wide, hands on hips, calling out, “To the Batmobile, Robin!” Our Hall of Justice was a tangle of rusted car parts and sheet metal in one corner of Granny’s backyard. Now you kids stay away from there, Granny would warn, shaking a finger. You’ll get lockjaw! Okay, okay, we sang back in unison, and headed right for it. In those days, Keith was always Batman and would select a Robin to keep me and my sisters from drawing blood trying to settle it ourselves. Sometimes he picked a number or did Eeny Meeny Miney Moe, but usually he lined us up against the fence, held his chin for a moment, as if deep in thought, then pointed. I preferred this method because it had nothing to do with luck; he was choosing, and when he chose me, the sun seemed to shoot off like a bottle rocket. Somehow, Penny and I got all the way around to the bank of elevators again before a nurse spotted us and led us to Keith’s room. Through the door was a single bed spewing tubes, banked by machines that blinked and hummed. There was no one else in the room, so it had to be him, the exploded thing above the sheet. His head was at least twice its size, a black basketball, burned and hairless. “Look who’s here,” said the basketball. “Granny said you might come. Get over here where I can see you.” It didn’t sound like my Keith, my Batman, but it wouldn’t: Keith was a grownup now. We sidled nearer, Penny half a step behind me. From where we had stood at the door, it had looked like all of Keith’s beautiful white-blond hair was gone, but no.

• From Like Family

  He helped me up then and asked, with a tenderness that leveled me, “Is there someone you can talk to?” [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] LABOR DAY 1983 . I rode low on Sky Harbor Drive in Bub’s poppy-colored GT, taking the corners like a professional. Heat wavered from the asphalt like pure sound. I passed gnarls of mesquite, acacia, fig—all an ashy, survivalist green—headed for the cove where Rhonda, Bo, Amber, Jacy and my sisters had gone to escape Fresno’s 115 degrees. I was dying for a swim too—wanted nothing more than to wade into the lake and feel my pink heat hiss away—though the woman at the clinic told me swimming after the procedure could lead to infection. When I got there, the entrance barrier was closed and twisted with yellow-and-black police tape. How odd. I parked next to Bo’s truck and walked down to the water in my cutoffs and one of Teresa’s cast-off Hawaiian-print shirts, my sandals kicking up a dust as parched and pale as flour. “Hey,” Amber called out from the middle of the cove, treading dingy water. “I thought you had to work.” I shook my head and settled next to Rhonda on a worn blanket. It only took her five minutes to tell me Teresa wasn’t speaking to her and hadn’t since the Stringers’ pool party, when she slept with Brian. “I don’t think Teresa and I can be friends anymore,” Rhonda said slowly, thoughtfully, not caring that Teresa was some ten feet away on another blanket. “She blames me for everything, but it was Brian’s idea. If he likes her so much, why was he screwing me?” She adjusted the halter of her turquoise suit. “I mean, how happy can he be ?” No one knew anything about why the police tape was there, but Rhonda led me down the sloped bank and around the shore to show me the flowers, maybe fifty or more white lilies, the kind mothers get on Easter, washed up on the sand. The stalks were soggy and bent, the petals laced with algae and drying foam. “Weird,” said Rhonda, nudging a stem with her bare toe. I didn’t think about telling Rhonda about the abortion. I hadn’t told anyone but Mark. He went with me, drove me home after and heated me a can of mushroom soup—trying to make up, I wagered, for how flat he’d been when I told him about the pregnancy. I’d gone to find him at work, asking him to take a walk with me. We were halfway down a city block when I spit it out. He changed course, veered right over to a cash machine, withdrew two hundred and fifty dollars and handed it to me. End of conversation. Strange: I’d always felt competitive with my sisters, wanting to have experiences neither of them had known, but now that I had done just that, I didn’t want to share. I wanted to keep it close, feel lonely with it.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  She alluded to 12 Years a Slave. “There he was,” she said, speaking of Solomon Northup. “He had means. He had a family. He was living like a human being. And one racist act took him back. And the same is true of me. I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes.” And then she talked again of all that she had, through great industry, through unceasing labor, acquired in the long journey from grinding poverty. She spoke of how her children had been raised in the lap of luxury—annual ski trips, jaunts off to Europe. She said that when her daughter was studying Shakespeare in high school, she took her to England. And when her daughter got her license at sixteen, a Mazda 626 was waiting in front. I sensed some connection to this desire to give and the raw poverty of her youth. I sensed that it was all as much for her as it was for her children. She said that Prince had never taken to material things. He loved to read. He loved to travel. But when he turned twenty-three, she bought him a jeep. She had a huge purple bow put on it. She told me that she could still see him there, looking at the jeep and simply saying, Thank you, Mom. Without interruption she added, “And that was the jeep he was killed in.” After I left, I sat in the car, idle for a few minutes. I thought of all that Prince’s mother had invested in him, and all that was lost. I thought of the loneliness that sent him to The Mecca, and how The Mecca, how we, could not save him, how we ultimately cannot save ourselves. I thought back on the sit-ins, the protestors with their stoic faces, the ones I’d once scorned for hurling their bodies at the worst things in life. Perhaps they had known something terrible about the world. Perhaps they so willingly parted with the security and sanctity of the black body because neither security nor sanctity existed in the first place. And all those old photographs from the 1960s, all those films I beheld of black people prostrate before clubs and dogs, were not simply shameful, indeed were not shameful at all—they were just true. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Makkai does an excellent job of capturing the jaded, ironic and affectionately jibing small talk of a group of cultured gay friends in the Reagan era. . . . Conversations among her gay male characters feel very real—not too flamboyant, not too serious, always morbidly witty. It’s hard not to get drawn into this circle of promising young men as they face their brutally premature extinction.” —Newsday “Rebecca Makkai’s novel The Great Believers has stolen my heart. Crossing decades and lives, love and loss, art, and the long lasting legacy of AIDS, the novel is a brilliant triumph of empathy and intimacy between friends.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children “Two distinct narratives intertwine ingeniously . . . The stories meet up to heartbreaking effect.” —New York Magazine “A poignant, historical journey through a virus’s outbreak and legacy.” —Condé Nast Traveler “This book will be compared to similar mammoth works of fiction, but Makkai differs in that she seems to care about her characters and her readers. . . . Each character—main or secondary—is fully developed, and it is hard not to care for them. The pain and prejudice they suffer becomes personal as their lives are carefully told . . . A forceful work of fiction that will captivate readers.” —Baltimore Outloud “Rebecca Makkai’s beautiful (literally—look at that cover!) novel takes us to an art gallery in Chicago at the height of the AIDS crisis. From Chicago to Paris, The Great Believers is a sweeping story of multi-generational trauma and the solitude that the AIDS epidemic created, as an entire generation was decimated by the virus.” —Fodor’s Travel “Powerfully emotional.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch “The Great Believers kept me up reading late into the night, and I’d wake up thinking about Makkai’s vibrant, complex, and deeply human characters. This is an immersive, heartbreaking novel—I loved it.” —Maggie Shipstead, author of Astonish Me “The Great Believers is a magnificent novel—well imagined, intricately plotted, and deeply felt, both humane and human. It unfurls like a peony: you keep thinking it can’t get any more perfect, and it does. A stunning feat.” —Rabih Alameddine, author of The Angel of History and Koolaids: The Art of War “The Great Believers is by turns funny, harrowing, tender, devastating, and always hugely suspenseful. It reminds us, poignantly, of how many people, mostly young, often brilliant, were lost to the AIDS epidemic, and of how those who survived were marked by that struggle. This is Rebecca Makkai at the height of her powers.” —Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of Mercury “Makkai is very good at conjuring a gay community enacting the usual dramas of love and lust and ambition and jealousy in a world where all the usual dramas suddenly can carry a fatal charge.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “With its broad time span and bedrock of ferocious, loving friendships, [The Great Believers ] might remind readers of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life . . .

• From Little Women (1868)

  "Hang Miss Randal!" and Laurie knocked the hat off his face with a look that left no doubt of his sentiments toward that young lady. "I beg pardon, I thought..." and there she paused diplomatically. "No, you didn't, you knew perfectly well I never cared for anyone but Jo," Laurie said that in his old, impetuous tone, and turned his face away as he spoke. "I did think so, but as they never said anything about it, and you came away, I supposed I was mistaken. And Jo wouldn't be kind to you? Why, I was sure she loved you dearly." "She was kind, but not in the right way, and it's lucky for her she didn't love me, if I'm the good-for-nothing fellow you think me. It's her fault though, and you may tell her so." The hard, bitter look came back again as he said that, and it troubled Amy, for she did not know what balm to apply. "I was wrong, I didn't know. I'm very sorry I was so cross, but I can't help wishing you'd bear it better, Teddy, dear." "Don't, that's her name for me!" and Laurie put up his hand with a quick gesture to stop the words spoken in Jo's half-kind, half-reproachful tone. "Wait till you've tried it yourself," he added in a low voice, as he pulled up the grass by the handful. "I'd take it manfully, and be respected if I couldn't be loved," said Amy, with the decision of one who knew nothing about it. Now, Laurie flattered himself that he had borne it remarkably well, making no moan, asking no sympathy, and taking his trouble away to live it down alone. Amy's lecture put the matter in a new light, and for the first time it did look weak and selfish to lose heart at the first failure, and shut himself up in moody indifference. He felt as if suddenly shaken out of a pensive dream and found it impossible to go to sleep again. Presently he sat up and asked slowly, "Do you think Jo would despise me as you do?" "Yes, if she saw you now. She hates lazy people. Why don't you do something splendid, and make her love you?" "I did my best, but it was no use." "Graduating well, you mean? That was no more than you ought to have done, for your grandfather's sake. It would have been shameful to fail after spending so much time and money, when everyone knew that you could do well." "I did fail, say what you will, for Jo wouldn't love me," began Laurie, leaning his head on his hand in a despondent attitude. "No, you didn't, and you'll say so in the end, for it did you good, and proved that you could do something if you tried.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Yale felt Charlie squeeze his hand as they dove into the crowd. Nico had made it clear there was to be a party. “If I get to hang out as a ghost, you think I wanna see sobbing? I’ll haunt you. You sit there crying, I’ll throw a lamp across the room, okay? I’ll shove a poker up your ass, and not in a good way.” If he’d died just two days ago, they wouldn’t have had it in them to follow through. But Nico died three weeks back, and the family delayed the vigil and funeral until his grandfather, the one no one had seen in twenty years, could fly in from Havana. Nico’s mother was the product of a brief, pre-Castro marriage between a diplomat’s daughter and a Cuban musician—and now this ancient Cuban man was crucial to the funeral planning, while Nico’s lover of three years wasn’t even welcome at the church tonight. Yale couldn’t think about it or he’d fume, which wasn’t what Nico wanted. In any case, they’d spent three weeks mourning and now Richard’s house brimmed with forced festivity. There were Julian and Teddy, for instance, waving down from the second-story railing that encircled the room. Another floor rose above that, and an elaborate round skylight presided over the whole space. It was more of a cathedral than the church had been. Someone shrieked with laughter far too close to Yale’s ear. Charlie said, “I believe we’re meant to have a good time.” Charlie’s British accent, Yale was convinced, emerged more in sarcasm. Yale said, “I’m waiting on the go-go dancers.” Richard had a piano, and someone was playing “Fly Me to the Moon.” What the hell were they all doing? A skinny man Yale had never seen before bear-hugged Charlie. An out-of-towner, he guessed, someone who’d lived here but moved away before Yale came on the scene. Charlie said, “How in hell did you get younger?” Yale waited to be introduced, but the man was telling an urgent story now about someone else Yale didn’t know. Charlie was the hub of a lot of wheels. A voice in Yale’s ear: “We’re drinking Cuba libres.” It was Fiona, Nico’s little sister, and Yale turned to hug her, to smell her lemony hair. “Isn’t it ridiculous?” Nico had been proud of the Cuban thing, but if he knew the chaos his grandfather’s arrival would cause, he’d have vetoed the beverage choice. Fiona had told them all, last night, that she wasn’t going to the funeral—that she’d be here instead—but still it was jarring to see her, to know she’d followed through. But then she’d written off her family as thoroughly as they’d written Nico off in the years before his illness. (Until, in his last days, they’d claimed him, insisting he die in the suburbs in an ill-equipped hospital with nice wallpaper.) Her mascara was smudged. She had discarded her shoes, but wobbled as if she still wore heels.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  I wished, desperately, that I could’ve been walking with him out the door of the hospital that evening. I wished we could’ve commiserated as we used to. I wished I could have told Jeff what I had come to understand about life, and our chosen way of life, if only to hear his wise, clever counsel. Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death—it’s something that happens to you and those around you. But Jeff and I had trained for years to actively engage with death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life. We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving. PART IICease Not till Death [image file=image_rsrc19B.jpg] If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. —Michel de Montaigne, “That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die” LYING NEXT TO LUCY in the hospital bed, both of us crying, the CT scan images still glowing on the computer screen, that identity as a physician—my identity—no longer mattered. With the cancer having invaded multiple organ systems, the diagnosis was clear. The room was quiet. Lucy told me she loved me. “I don’t want to die,” I said. I told her to remarry, that I couldn’t bear the thought of her being alone. I told her we should refinance the mortgage immediately. We started calling family members. At some point, Victoria came by the room, and we discussed the scan and the likely future treatments. When she brought up the logistics of returning to residency, I stopped her. “Victoria,” I said, “I’m never coming back to this hospital as a doctor. Don’t you think?” One chapter of my life seemed to have ended; perhaps the whole book was closing. Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused. Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering. It felt less like an epiphany—a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters—and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward. Now I would have to work around it. My brother Jeevan had arrived at my bedside. “You’ve accomplished so much,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Before Judy and John told them, Judy had consulted a family counselor who warned her that the children would have questions—and she needed to come prepared with answers. Unlike other kinds of unhappy couples, the Blumes weren’t demonstrative in their moments of friction. They weren’t big yellers or fighters. As far as young Randy and Larry were concerned, their polite, upstanding parents were perfectly content. “It was a nice marriage,” Blume later said, “but inside I was dying.” To explain herself, Judy wrote letters to the kids before they left for the summer, which they read alone in their rooms and then came together to sob. When home feels safe, divorce can be catastrophic to the children. Judy knew that all too well, having put herself in Karen’s shoes to write It’s Not the End of the World . Despite the book’s sunny title and its optimistic ending, Judy recognized the pain that it took to get there. Still, she felt she had no other choice. A few years before she initiated the split, Judy felt herself, at the age of thirty-five, undergoing a massive change—one that she’d eventually describe as an adolescent rebellion, just delayed by twenty years. Essie, who she spoke to twice a day, became representative of Judy’s subtle, lifelong indoctrination into a role—the self-annihilating housewife—that no longer suited her. That perspective transformed John in her eyes from a good-enough spouse and a solid provider to a figurehead of her mother’s middle-class values. Judy was sick of it all: the PTA meetings, the dinners at the club, the aqua-lined pool in the backyard. Suddenly, she felt an overwhelming urge “to taste and experience life,” she said in Presenting Judy Blume . “I wasn’t terrible. I was responsible. I was working. I loved the kids. But I was rebelling… My divorce was all part of that rebellion.” Judy recognized a level of childishness in herself, which she came by honestly, having gone straight from her parents’ house to her husband’s. She felt immature in ways she didn’t like, and realized that John treated her in kind, like something delicate and unformed. Before the divorce, Judy had understood—with a level of dread—that she wanted desperately to take shape. She wished to be a person with edges and depth and firm, well-defined corners, just like one of her characters. John blamed Fear of Flying . Erica Jong’s unrestrained roman à clef, about marriage and a successful female writer’s messy interior life, came out in 1973, before the Blumes separated. Isadora White Wing is a twice-wed Jewish poet from New York who, five years into her second marriage to psychoanalyst Bennett Wing, finds herself desperate for adventure and sexual novelty. She still loves Bennett but can’t deny the sense of yearning that has cast a shadow over her daily life with him. “What was marriage anyway?” Wing wonders early in the novel.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I am marked, in so many ways, by what I went through. I survived it, but that isn’t the whole of the story. Over the years, I have learned the importance of survival and claiming the label of “survivor,” but I don’t mind the label of “victim.” I also don’t think there’s any shame in saying that when I was raped, I became a victim, and to this day, while I am also many other things, I am still a victim. It took me a long time, but I prefer “victim” to “survivor” now. I don’t want to diminish the gravity of what happened. I don’t want to pretend I’m on some triumphant, uplifting journey. I don’t want to pretend that everything is okay. I’m living with what happened, moving forward without forgetting, moving forward without pretending I am unscarred. This is the memoir of my body. My body was broken. I was broken. I did not know how to put myself back together. I was splintered. A part of me was dead. A part of me was mute and would stay that way for many years. I was hollowed out. I was determined to fill the void, and food was what I used to build a shield around what little was left of me. I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. She is still small and scared and ashamed, and perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needs to hear. 9I was broken, and to numb the pain of that brokenness, I ate and ate and ate, and then I was not just overweight or fat. Less than a decade later, I was morbidly obese and then I was super morbidly obese. I was trapped in my body, one I made but barely recognized or understood. I was miserable, but I was safe. Or at least I could tell myself I was safe. My memories of the after are scattered, fragmentary, but I do clearly remember eating and eating and eating so I could forget, so my body could become so big it would never be broken again. I remember the quiet comfort of eating when I was lonely or sad or even happy.

• From Controversies of the Early Christian History (2013)

  132 Lecture 20: Was Christianity an Illegal Religion? the Roman historian Tacitus around the year 115 in his book The Annals of Rome. o According to Tacitus, Nero hired arsonists to burn down parts of the city of Rome so that he could replace these quarters with some architectural designs of his own choosing. The populace who had been burned out suspected Nero, but the emperor blamed the Christians because they were known for their hatred of the human race. He rounded up Christians in Rome and subjected them to horrible tortures. o Note that Nero’s persecution was localized to Rome; it was not empire-wide. Moreover, it was not a persecution based on being Christian; although they were Christians, those who were tortured and executed were charged with arson.  The next episode we learn about took place during the reign of the emperor Trajan, sometime between 110–112 C.E. We know about this persecution from the letters of Pliny the Younger. o Pliny was the governor of a region of Asia Minor called Pontus Bithynia. He wrote to the emperor asking for advice on how to punish Christians who were gathering to worship. His own approach had been to execute those who insisted that they were Christians and to force those who claimed not to be Christians to perform a sacrifi ce to the gods and curse Christ. o Pliny goes on to say that large numbers of people in his province had become Christians. In his response, the emperor tells Pliny that Christians are not to be sought out, but if they are denounced, they are to be put on trial and, if they refuse to recant, executed.  We have a number of writings from Christians about the martyrdoms that resulted from these persecutions, including a book called the Letter of Leon et Vient. This letter was allegedly written by Christians who had survived a persecution in the province of Gaul (France). 133 o The letter describes a massive uprising against Christians at the grassroots level by a mob; eventually, Christians were arrested, and the ruling authorities tried to get them to recant. In this account, the Christians remained fi rm in their beliefs even in the face of torture and death. For Christian authors, tales of martyrdom emphasized the idea that the present world was transitory; it was the world to come that mattered. © Getty Images/Photos.com/Thinkstock.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  The killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit, were created by the policy of Dreamers, but their weight, their shame, rests solely upon those who are dying in them. There is a great deception in this. To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding. And the premise that allows for these killing fields—the reduction of the black body—is no different than the premise that allowed for the murder of Prince Jones. The Dream of acting white, of talking white, of being white, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in Chicago with frightening regularity. Do not accept the lie. Do not drink from poison. The same hands that drew red lines around the life of Prince Jones drew red lines around the ghetto. — I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness. I resolved to hide nothing from you. Do you remember when I first took you to work, when you were thirteen? I was going to see the mother of a dead black boy. The boy had exchanged hard words with a white man and been killed, because he refused to turn down his music. The killer, having emptied his gun, drove his girlfriend to a hotel. They had drinks. They ordered a pizza. And then the next day, at his leisure, the man turned himself in. The man claimed to have seen a shotgun. He claimed to have been in fear for his life and to only have triumphed through righteous violence. “I was the victim and the victor,” he asserted, much as generations of American plunderers had asserted before. No shotgun was ever found. The claim still influenced the jury, and the killer was convicted not of the boy’s murder but of firing repeatedly as the boy’s friends tried to retreat. Destroying the black body was permissible—but it would be better to do it efficiently. The mother of this murdered black boy was then taking her case before journalists and writers. We met her in the lobby of her Times Square hotel. She was medium height with brown skin and hair down to her shoulders. It had not even been a week since the verdict. But she was composed and wholly self-possessed. She did not rage at the killer but wondered aloud if the rules she’d imparted had been enough. She had wanted her son to stand for what he believed and to be respectful. And he had died for believing his friends had a right to play their music loud, to be American teenagers. Still, she was left wondering. “In my mind I keep saying, ‘Had he not spoke back, spoke up, would he still be here?’ ”

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Two very pretty, very young men circulated with trays of little quiches and stuffed mushrooms and deviled eggs. Yale wondered why the food wasn’t Cuban, too, to match the drinks, but Richard probably had just one plan for every party: Open the doors, open the bar, boys with quiche. In any case, this was infinitely better than that strange and dishonest vigil last night. The church had smelled nicely of incense, but otherwise there was little about it Nico would have liked. “He wouldn’t be caught dead here,” Charlie had said, and then he’d heard himself and tried to laugh. The parents had carefully invited Nico’s lover to the vigil, saying it was “an appropriate time for friends to pay respect.” Meaning, don’t come today to the actual mass. Meaning, don’t really even show up for the vigil, but aren’t we generous? But Terrence had gone last night, and so had eight friends. Mostly to surround Terrence, and to support Fiona, who, it turned out, had convinced her parents to issue the invitation; she’d told them that if Nico’s friends weren’t invited, she’d stand up during the service and say so. Still, plenty of friends had bowed out. Asher Glass had claimed his body would revolt at setting foot in a Catholic church. (“I’d start yelling about rubbers. Swear to God.”) The eight of them sat shoulder to shoulder in the back, a phalanx of suits around Terrence. It would have been nice if Terrence could have blended in anonymously, but they weren’t even seated yet when Yale heard an older woman pointing him out to her husband: “That one. The black gentleman with the glasses.” As if there were another black guy in this church, one with perfect vision. That woman wasn’t the only one who kept glancing back throughout the service to observe, anthropologically, when and if this gay black specimen might start weeping. Yale held Charlie’s hand low down—not as a statement, but because Charlie was so allergic to churches. “I see kneelers and hymnals,” he said, “and five tons of Anglican guilt lands on my neck.” So, far below anyone else’s sightline, Yale had rubbed his wide thumb over Charlie’s bony one. Family members told stories only about Nico as a child, as if he’d died in adolescence. There was one good one, told by Nico’s stoic and ashen father: Fiona, when she was seven, had wanted twenty cents to buy a handful of Swedish Fish candy from the bin on the counter of the convenience store. Their father pointed out that she’d already spent her allowance. Fiona had started to cry. And Nico, who was eleven, sat down in the middle of the aisle and, for five minutes, twisted and yanked at his barely loose molar until it came out. It bled—and their father, an orthodontist, was alarmed at the jagged root still attached. But Nico pocketed the tooth and said, “The Tooth Fairy’s bringing a quarter tonight, right?” In front of Fiona, Dr.

• From Little Women (1868)

  For with eyes made clear by many tears, and a heart softened by the tenderest sorrow, she recognized the beauty of her sister's life—uneventful, unambitious, yet full of the genuine virtues which 'smell sweet, and blossom in the dust', the self-forgetfulness that makes the humblest on earth remembered soonest in heaven, the true success which is possible to all. One night when Beth looked among the books upon her table, to find something to make her forget the mortal weariness that was almost as hard to bear as pain, as she turned the leaves of her old favorite, Pilgrims's Progress, she found a little paper, scribbled over in Jo's hand. The name caught her eye and the blurred look of the lines made her sure that tears had fallen on it. "Poor Jo! She's fast asleep, so I won't wake her to ask leave. She shows me all her things, and I don't think she'll mind if I look at this", thought Beth, with a glance at her sister, who lay on the rug, with the tongs beside her, ready to wake up the minute the log fell apart. MY BETH Sitting patient in the shadow Till the blessed light shall come, A serene and saintly presence Sanctifies our troubled home. Earthly joys and hopes and sorrows Break like ripples on the strand Of the deep and solemn river Where her willing feet now stand. O my sister, passing from me, Out of human care and strife, Leave me, as a gift, those virtues Which have beautified your life. Dear, bequeath me that great patience Which has power to sustain A cheerful, uncomplaining spirit In its prison-house of pain. Give me, for I need it sorely, Of that courage, wise and sweet, Which has made the path of duty Green beneath your willing feet. Give me that unselfish nature, That with charity divine Can pardon wrong for love's dear sake— Meek heart, forgive me mine! Thus our parting daily loseth Something of its bitter pain, And while learning this hard lesson, My great loss becomes my gain. For the touch of grief will render My wild nature more serene, Give to life new aspirations, A new trust in the unseen. Henceforth, safe across the river, I shall see forever more A beloved, household spirit Waiting for me on the shore. Hope and faith, born of my sorrow, Guardian angels shall become, And the sister gone before me By their hands shall lead me home. Blurred and blotted, faulty and feeble as the lines were, they brought a look of inexpressible comfort to Beth's face, for her one regret had been that she had done so little, and this seemed to assure her that her life had not been useless, that her death would not bring the despair she feared. As she sat with the paper folded between her hands, the charred log fell asunder. Jo started up, revived the blaze, and crept to the bedside, hoping Beth slept.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I started crying. “Why are you stealing my dog?!” I turned to Fufi and begged her. “Fufi, why are you doing this to me?! Why, Fufi?! Why?!” I called to her. I begged her to come. Fufi was deaf to my pleas. And everything else. I jumped onto my bike and raced home, tears running down my face. I loved Fufi so much. To see her with another boy, acting like she didn’t know me, after I raised her, after all the nights we spent together. I was heartbroken. That evening Fufi didn’t come home. Because the other family thought I was coming to steal their dog, they had decided to lock her inside, so she couldn’t make it back the way she normally did to wait for us outside the fence. My mom got home from work. I was in tears. I told her Fufi had been kidnapped. We went back to the house. My mom rang the bell and confronted the mom. “Look, this is our dog.” This lady lied to my mom’s face. “This is not your dog. We bought this dog.” “You didn’t buy the dog. It’s our dog.” They went back and forth. This woman wasn’t budging, so we went home to get evidence: pictures of us with the dogs, certificates from the vet. I was crying the whole time, and my mom was losing her patience with me. “Stop crying! We’ll get the dog! Calm down!” We gathered up our documentation and went back to the house. This time we brought Panther with us, as part of the proof. My mom showed this lady the pictures and the information from the vet. She still wouldn’t give us Fufi. My mom threatened to call the police. It turned into a whole thing. Finally my mom said, “Okay, I’ll give you a hundred rand.” “Fine,” the lady said. My mom gave her some money and she brought Fufi out. The other kid, who thought Fufi was Spotty, had to watch his mother sell the dog he thought was his. Now he started crying. “Spotty! No! Mom, you can’t sell Spotty!” I didn’t care. I just wanted Fufi back. Once Fufi saw Panther she came right away. The dogs left with us and we walked. I sobbed the whole way home, still heartbroken. My mom had no time for my whining. “Why are you crying?!” “Because Fufi loves another boy.” “So? Why would that hurt you? It didn’t cost you anything. Fufi’s here. She still loves you. She’s still your dog. So get over it.” Fufi was my first heartbreak. No one has ever betrayed me more than Fufi. It was a valuable lesson to me. The hard thing was understanding that Fufi wasn’t cheating on me with another boy. She was merely living her life to the fullest. Until I knew that she was going out on her own during the day, her other relationship hadn’t affected me at all. Fufi had no malicious intent.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  For the better part of the next four years, I spent most of my time in that building, smoking cigarettes, eating garlic cheeseburgers, gossiping about interoffice romances, and sleeping off hangovers on the broken-down couch in the corner of the newsroom that we affectionately named “the Green Whore.” College life was providing me with the escape I craved, the acceptance I searched for, and the structure I desperately needed. NANCY, ON THE OTHER hand, was going from bad to worse. She tried to kill herself again that fall and again just before Christmas 1975 by swallowing yet another bottle of sleeping pills. (Why weren’t my parents locking up these damn pills?) We all got through the holidays, and on the day after New Year’s, they drove her to Chicago-Read Mental Health Center, the state-run hospital, formerly known as Dunning and, before that, the County Insane Asylum and Infirmary. Medical records I obtained years later from an open records request describe Nancy as a “white, single, very attractive 22-year-old woman who appears much younger than her age.” They note that Nancy had recently tried to kill herself by swallowing pills, and my parents were worried that she might try to kill herself again. I imagine Holmer and my mother were greatly troubled to have to take Nancy to this facility, but they had no choice. She had just spent several weeks for yet another stint at Evanston Hospital’s psych ward, and they had no money left for private care. The notes show that Nancy had a hard time at Read. The attending nurse reported that one night a little more than a week into her eighteen-day stay, Nancy was “crying and squealing,” afraid that her body “was breaking apart.” The next day, one of the social workers wrote: Nancy appears to be a very immature young woman with little insight into her problems, i.e. things just happen to her and she is unable to see her role in creating her own situations. She is a very dependent, needy person who seemingly manipulates others by playing a very helpless role. Well, yes, she was needy, you idiot, I thought when I read those notes years later. She had serious mental illness. That’s why she was in a damn hospital. The medical staff noted that Nancy was hearing voices, had a distorted body image and very low self-esteem, and was preoccupied with thoughts of suicide. They wondered if she was suffering from hysterical psychosis, an emotional reaction to a traumatic event. The notes do not specify what that traumatic event may have been. She reported “multiple drug problems,” but the chart didn’t list any specifics. Under medical history, the staff referenced her many suicide attempts and that she had been at the Menninger Clinic for four months the previous year. They also noted that Nancy had come home just before the end of her sophomore year at the University of Colorado but made no mention of her car accident or the abortion.