Johnna G

“Sometimes, family isn’t just what you’re born into—it’s also what you build in the aftermath of loss.”
― Shari Franke, The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom

“It reminded me, that when we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity. We can do and be so much for each other. But only when we see one another in our full humanity. Not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.

Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“If you are able to extend grace to yourself to see yourself as the imperfect human that you are, full of the complicated feelings that accompany a loss, feelings that ebb and flow, you will be more able to extend it to others as well. When we refuse to offer ourselves grace and accept whatever we are experiencing, we make it harder to move through it, and we make it nearly impossible for others to effectively help us.
Grief is a tricky beast, and there is no such thing as grieving "perfectly." Be prepared to extend grace to those around you, but most importantly, you need to extend grace to yourself.”
― Marisa Renee Lee, Grief Is Love: Living with Loss