l’s Reviews > The Undying > Status Update

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

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."

sometmies people told me "i woudl ratherdie than.."--the ellipsis to be filled in with how they would rather be dead than do what I must to live.

“To be declared with certainty ill while feeling with certainty fine is to fall on the hardness of language without being given even an hour of soft uncertainty in which to steady oneself with preemptive worry, aka now you don’t have a solution to a problem, now you have a specific name for a life breaking in two. [...] Once we were sick in our bodies. Now we are sick in a body of light.”