Years ago I trained to be a doula for the dying, a companion for those in the last stages of life, visiting an hour or so a week or a day. That did not prepare me for living with someone who tells me regularly she only has two weeks to live.  

“Everyone around you . . . they’re all experiencing the collateral damage of living. They are all grieving someone, missing someone, worried about someone.”

“…when a piece of knitted or woven cloth…unravels, it separates into a single thread. Perhaps that’s an easier way to look at this process…not as a falling apart, but as a paring down, a reduction to a single, unbound thread, from which to weave again.”

“…Larry grabbed me and asked if I would be writing about him. I told him I could if he wanted me to, but only if he wanted me to. Tears suddenly sprang to his eyes and he said, “As long as you make it beautiful. Because it was. The whole thing. Even the hard parts.”

“I know so many of them are fighting very hard to be heard. I hope they keep fighting. I hope they never give up. I believe there will be a day when all girls have the same freedom that I have. I just hope that day comes soon.”

“I had a health scare last week that slapped me, once again, into awareness that I’m alone.”

“I carried shame from generations I had never even met. Generations who had shame imposed on them for nothing more than being the wrong people at the wrong time. Wrong stories, wrong skin. I have lived a life carrying things that were never mine to carry in the first place.”

“I didn’t know enough to know I should be afraid of survival, too. I didn’t know I should be more afraid of mouths that mark you for a lifetime than the jaws that swallow you whole.”

There was a knack to winding it up, or getting it to actually supply electricity to the bulb or stick to the inner tube. It was just a knack. There was a knack to getting it started in the morning. If you didn’t have the knack, you were already in arrears.

“When Mike died at 47 — cardiac arrest caused by an enlarged heart and a blocked artery — our large, vital running community got a collective stitch: that sharp pain beneath the ribs, the stab that constrains the breath…What stopped his heart broke ours.”

“Imagine having a swarm of rabid bumblebees trapped inside your head. There are hundreds of buzzing bees, and every single bee has its own project to do. Every bumblebee project is emergent and needs to be completed, in its entirety, immediately.”

“Sight loss has meant insight gains. . . . I don’t know what society’s perfection looks like as I have never been able to properly see. I can tell you though what a beautiful person is like. A beautiful person is loving. A beautiful person is kind.”

“I no longer remembered the name of the girl my husband had an affair with. It was interesting to me that this name, a name I had previously hated, a name that circled my mind over and over like a rusty old record, had suddenly slipped out of my brain.”

“Did you know that nearly 9,000 people fell to the ground together in 2007 to make snow angels in North Dakota? Did you know that I’ve started a collection of door knockers to hang by our staircase? Did you know that some tarantulas are cobalt blue? WE ALL HAVE SO MUCH TO LEARN.”

“So you keep a secret drawer with a few items of her favorite clothes. And you retreat to press your face into them, searching for the familiar scent of her that has long since faded.” — Suzanne Leitz on the marks left by loss.