When Life Gives You Pears: The Healing Power of Family, Faith, and Funny People

by Jeannie Gaffigan

We knew that luck had nothing to do with it, unless luck parted the Red Sea for Moses.

If I hadn’t made the journey through the hard times before, I probably wouldn’t have been able to gather the strength to face this one.

Being angry with people who are trying to help you is something that contradicts all logic, yet looking back on this scene, it feels strangely familiar to me as a mother, and probably would for anyone who is a caregiver.

There’s no place for OCD in the ICU. As I lay there practically paralyzed, I had to come face-to-face with my demons. I was addicted to control, and I was in withdrawal.

Time is the longest distance between two places. —Tennessee Williams

I had been so consumed with just getting through each moment, I was completely unconcerned with the future, even though my surviving this had everything to do with my future. Dr. Bederson was so confident in my living through this and recovering completely that he was considering how I would feel about my appearance in the future, because there actually would be a future when I was well! That’s the kind of confidence you want in a doctor.

The arbitrary decision to “give up bread” because it is supposedly bad for you used to seem to me to be not only logical, but smart. Now it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. Like cutting down on air to make your lungs more active. I wondered if you offered a starving man a loaf of bread, would he ask, “Is that gluten-free?”

I wanted to jump right on a bike, but I learned that I had to take it slower. Even though I’d lived my whole life as if racing in a 50-yard dash, now I had to take the attitude of a long-distance runner: pace yourself at the beginning in order to run the second half faster than the first, and finish strong.

You can’t hide from pain. Things aren’t always going to go your way. Nothing is going to get handed to you, and if it does, it’s not going to have much value.

I was taking so much time to make sure my garden looked perfect that I was missing my chance to smell the flowers.