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March 15 - April 5, 2020
Dying has taught me a great deal about living—about facing hard truths consciously, about embracing the suffering as well as the joy. Wrapping my arms around the hard parts was perhaps the great liberating experience of my life.
Live while you’re living, friends. From the beginning of the miracle, to the unwinding of the miracle.
But I do know that there is incredible value in pain and suffering, if you allow yourself to experience it, to cry, to feel sorrow and grief, to hurt.
You will understand that nothing lasts forever, not pain, or joy. You will understand that
joy cannot exist without sadness. Relief cannot exist without pain. Compassion cannot exist without cruelty. Courage cannot exist without fear. Hope cannot exist without despair. Wisdom cannot exist without suffering. Gratitude cannot exist without deprivation. Paradoxes abound in this life. Living is an exercise in navigating within them.
It taught me to ask for help, to not be ashamed of my physical shortcoming.
the human condition as we can squeeze into one lifetime, however long or short that may be. We are here to feel the complex range of emotions that come with being human. And from those experiences, our souls expand and grow and learn and change, and we understand a little more about what it really means to be human. I call it the evolution of the soul.
The worth of a person’s life lies not in the number of years lived; rather it rests on how well
that person has absorbed the lessons of that life, how well that person has come to understand and distill the multiple, messy aspects of the human experience.
traveling alone to the seven continents represented a deeply personal journey that soothed and empowered my soul, quieting my anger and selfdoubt and imbuing my spirit with a sense of unparalleled strength and independence in a way that no one and nothing else ever could.
Traveling alone was the single most effective and grueling test I could put myself through, emotionally, mentally, and physically, to prove to myself that I could do as much as anyone else could.
In the greatest of ironies, traveling alone made me feel whole and complete inside; it helped to heal my anguished soul, which for so long had been obsessed with the metaphysical questions.
All of these people whose threads of life have touched mine taught me about different ways of living, thinking, and being, and in
doing so enriched my consciousness and touched my soul.
I was a little nervous about traveling alone—most people would be—but then add to that my visual limitations, and I was more than a little nervous. It was one of those things I had to do to prove to the world (but mostly to myself) that I could.
Sometimes you just need someone to listen to you.
Knowing that I would never see her one-on-one again and that she had no preconceived notions about me just made it easier somehow.
Your future is not set in stone. In the beginning, there are many things that we have no control over—where we are born, who our parents are, how we come into this world with something wrong with our eyes or maybe our ears or our legs, whatever it is—but from there it’s up to us to decide what we do with what we’ve been given. We make our own choices.”
statistics, for my own self-preservation I intuitively shunned the numbers, insisting to myself and Josh as well that I
The sense that we ever had control over any of this seems nothing but a mockery now, a cruel illusion. And also, a lesson: we control nothing. Well, that’s not exactly true. We control how good we are to people. We control how honest we are with ourselves and others. We control the effort we have put into living. We control how we respond to impossible news. And when the time comes, we control the terms of our surrender.
Your best effort is all you can ask of yourself—no more and no less. And once you’ve done that, there can be no regrets.
urge all of you who face your own challenges that make you want to fall into the darkness to fight, too, because you, too, are part of humanity, and your fight matters and gives me and others strength when we falter.
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
For me, true inner strength lies in facing death with serenity, in recognizing that death is not the enemy but simply an inevitable part of life.
In what is the greatest irony of all, I have come to realize that in accepting death, I am embracing life in all of its splendor, for the first time.
Ever since I was diagnosed, I’ve learned that so much of life’s hardship becomes more bearable when you are able to build and lean on a network of loyalty, support, and love, and gather around you people (even your contractor) who will stand by you and help you. But the thing is you have to let them in; you have to let them see the heartache, pain, and vulnerability, and not cloak those things in a shameful darkness, and then you have to let those people who care about you help you.
Brevity really is the soul of wit.
Remember that, Mia: only you can determine for yourself what you are capable of; no one else can, not even Mommy or Daddy.
But everything good in my life started because I was willing to work hard, to be determined and disciplined because I wanted something for myself so very much. That’s why I want you to learn the value of working hard. Don’t ever forget this story, okay? I want you to remember Mommy’s story forever.
worked out hard so I could be physically strong and fight as fiercely as I could if I were attacked; I bought travel insurance. Then I let everything else go and put faith in myself and a higher power, and I just walked forward, through the fear, into my incredible adventure. Rather than shrouded in shadows, Bangladesh was and is a beautiful place filled with vibrant colors and kind people. My dark prognostications had been wrong. That night in the hospital room, I willed myself to again acknowledge the fear, told myself to do everything within my power to control my destiny and let everything
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but also the things of life I will miss. I will miss the simple ritual of loading and unloading the dishwasher. I will miss the smooth patina of my cast-iron skillet, brought on by cooking countless meals. I will miss making Costco runs. I will miss watching TV with Josh. I will miss taking my kids to school. I will miss this life so very much. They say that youth is wasted on the young. Now, as I approach my final days, I realize that health is wasted on the healthy, and life is wasted on the living. I never understood that until now, as I prepare in earnest to leave this life.
And nothing could have made me more proud of myself and love myself and feel such profound gratitude for what I could do and what vision I did have than kayaking through the Antarctic waters. I learned that no one could tell me what I could or couldn’t do, that only I could set my limitations. I learned to appreciate everything that I could do, that indeed even some people with normal vision couldn’t have traveled the world alone as I had. I learned to accept myself as I am, to be patient with and love myself.
who told me he’d been to Antarctica and that it had been a very spiritual experience. That planted the seed in my head, and
It is in the acceptance of truth that real wisdom and peace come. It is in the acceptance of truth that real living begins. Conversely, avoidance of truth is the denial of life.
