Ann Neumann > Quotes

“Hope is prayer’s second cousin, darkly dressed and hovering around the outside edge of the family photograph. If prayer is a plea to the Almighty for a precedented miracle—prayer’s memory is long—hope is a plea to nothing, to everything, to any possible refutation of the facts. It is tethered to the dreadful single-digit percentage, the medical equipment humming, the long sleepless night. Prayer can (or once could) deliver a miracle; hope can only give a body another week, maybe another month. Sometimes the dying can set goals and reach them: just let me see my son get married, my granddaughter turn ten, my family carve into the Thanksgiving turkey. Hope can outlast dress fittings, gift wrapping, and potato mashing, but it can’t deliver anything more. What hope does best is make plans. Sometimes those plans are to desperately avoid the worst.”
― Ann Neumann, The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America

“Embracing Our Mortality, Lawrence J. Schneiderman,”
― Ann Neumann, The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America

“Peter Trachtenberg describes in The Book of Calamities: I was launching myself into an investigation with all the raw energies and emotions I had put into grieving. “Before suffering people can form a coherent picture of their suffering,” he writes, “they must first ask questions about it, or maybe of it. In doing so, they are performing the work of science and philosophy, interrogating their reality in order to derive a thesis about it.”
― Ann Neumann, The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America