On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

You see, I am so terribly, terribly afraid of dying. My own dying and other people’s dying and animals’ dying. I am afraid of the lifting and bending and feeding and wiping to come. I am afraid of the blood and the fluids and the suffering and the pain. I am afraid of being weak, sick, immobile, demented, blind, deaf—whatever of these might come to me and to those I love.