On my mind...

Some of the most honest writing I've experienced about cancer...

"Sifting through the videocassettes, the Mother wonders what science fiction could begin to compete with the science fiction of cancer itself - a tumor with its differentiated muscle and tone cells, a clump of wild nothing, and its mad, ambitious desire to be something: something inside you, instead of you, another organism, but with a monster's architecture, a demon's sabotage and chaos.  Think of leukemia, a tumor diabolically taking liquid form, better to swim incognito in the blood.  George Lucas - direct that!...

... Pulling through is what people do around here.  There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn't bravery at all.  It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess and an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow?  'Everyone admires us for our courage,' says one man, 'they have no idea what they're talking about.'"

- Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are the Only People Here"