Madi > Recent Status Updates

I’ve seen things I never expected to see and felt things I never expected to feel—not the least of them what I felt and still feel for the child sleeping down the hall from me. She’s my little guy now, I’m her big guy, and that’s the important thing. Nothing else seems to matter half so much.

I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.

I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.

Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.


[3/3]

We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things—fish and unicorns and men on horseback—but they are really only clouds.


[2/3]

This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T.


[1/2]

He might have bought his false teeth out of a catalogue, but he wasn’t stupid.

Things with the power to scare the living shit out of you on a thundery midnight in most cases seem only interesting in the bright light of a summer morning.

Yankee men don’t hug—that’s a truism you can put right up there with tough guys don’t dance and real men don’t eat quiche—but Bill pumped my hand almost hard enough to slop coffee from a cup that was three-quarters empty, and gave me a hearty clap on the back.

So what? I asked myself. Even if it should be true, so what? Ghosts can’t hurt anyone.
That’s what I thought then.

Brenda Meserve had done her best, but any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.

The sound of your voice when you’re alone can be either scary or reassuring. That time it was the latter.

Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even when they try their best to be identical, because we’re never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.

But in places like Lane Forty-two, you find that all the smoke and mirrors have been removed. What’s left is the sound of crickets and the sight of green leaves darkening toward black; branches that make shapes like faces; the sound of your heart in your chest, the beat of the blood against the backs of your eyes, and the look of the sky as the day’s blue blood runs out of its cheek.


[2/2]

What I do remember is a feeling I’d had before when I was down here, especially when I was walking this road by myself. It was a sense that reality was thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.


[1/2]

Grief is like a drunken houseguest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.

“Ralph Roberts,” he said. “I volunteer down at the Red Cross. Me and my wife, Lois.”


page 67:
Everything going all right? I only ask because you look tired. If it’s insomnia, I can sympathize, believe me.

Ralph from Insomnia, which I just read! Always fun to meet a character twice.

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled onto the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.

“I’m done, Jo,” I said as I sat there beneath the paddling fans. “So that’s all right, isn’t it?”
There was no response. In light of all that came later, I think that’s worth repeating—there was no response. I didn’t sense, as I later did, that I was not alone in a room which appeared empty.

Paul is gone, and I miss him acutely nearly every moment, but I somehow feel I’m still taking part in the life we created together.


[2/2]

I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it.


[1/2]

Even while terminally ill, Paul was fully alive; despite physical collapse, he remained vigorous, open, full of hope not for an unlikely cure but for days that were full of purpose and meaning.

His cancer diagnosis was like a nutcracker, getting us back into the soft, nourishing meat of our marriage. We hung on to each other for his physical survival and our emotional survival, our love stripped bare.



[2/2]

Most of our family and friends will have been unaware, until the publication of this book, of the marital trouble Paul and I weathered toward the end of his residency. But I am glad Paul wrote about it. It’s part of our truth, another redefinition, a piece of the struggle and redemption and meaning of Paul’s life and mine.


[1/2]

Alexander Pope: “A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”

Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.


[2/2]

I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything.



[1/2]

There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.

- excerpt from a short story written by the author’s friend

Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life.