Status Updates From The Undying

my permit for private grief has long expired like everyone else's

to have a body means you will not always see what has happened to it

A woman I know tells me that she, as she had once known herself, has never really returned from the cancer she had 30 years ago. Now in her 70s, she says that she goes to work and comes home each day to spend her hours in disassociated blankness, and because she has to work for a living, must go there once more in the morning and pretend that she exists again.

I come across a headline: “Attitude Is Everything for Breast Cancer Survivor.” I look for the headline “Attitude Is Everything for Ebola Patient” or “Attitude Is Everything for Guy with Diabetes” or “Attitude Is Everything for Those with Congenital Syphilis” or “Attitude Is Everything with Lead Poisoning” or “Attitude Is Everything When a Dog Bites Your Hand” or “Attitude Is Everything for Gunshot Victim”...

‘In literature, one person’s cancer seems to exist as an instrument of another person’s epiphanies, and sickness takes the form of how sick a person looks. [... None of this literature is bad, but all of it is unforgivable."