Nicole

“It’s hard to explain the injustice of the United States health care system to Australians, whose taxpayer-funded Medicare covers everyone, a principle accepted by left and right alike. Australians gasp to learn how Americans are driven to bankruptcy by illness, and that lifesaving medications might cost the uninsured tens of thousands of dollars a year. I had become numb to this madness. But that someone could pay almost five grand for a month’s insurance and not have any coverage was a new level of insanity.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“I have written this because I needed to do it. Part of the treatment for “complicated grief” is to relive the trauma of the death, returning to the moments again and again, striving each time to recall more detail. That’s what I have tried to do.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“I’m not sure if our modern secular world has the capacity to come up with a gentler way of dealing with bereavement.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

“You taught me the courage of stars before you left, how light carries on endlessly, even after death.” Those lyrics are from a song titled “Saturn,” by Ryan O’Neal, who performs as Sleeping at Last. It is a song about a deathbed conversation, the imparting of wisdom from a dying person to a beloved survivor: that it is an extraordinary chance to have existed at all, a rare and marvelous happenstance to have lived and experienced consciousness. Even more rare and marvelous, in this riven, aching world, to have thrived. To have found love, joy, security, fulfillment.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days