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

by Jeannie Gaffigan

I’ll never eat a pear again. I never was a huge fan of them anyway. They are either too hard and taste like nothing, or delicious but an absolute mess. Pears are sort of a metaphor for life. I guess I do like pears. Just not pear-shaped tumors.

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.

was once a force in this house, and now I was treated like a fragile piece of china that might break if you breathed on it too hard.

It’s not that politics don’t matter—obviously the policies of our politicians affect people’s lives in grand and small ways, but what I’m talking about is the spectacle of politics. The thing that robs us of all capacity to see nuance and to find the humanity in others beyond the political label. Back in the ICU all the people who came to help me could have been from diverse political viewpoints, but they weren’t fighting with one another. They were working together around a common cause: love for me.

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

Without my suffering, it would have been impossible to achieve this higher level of joy. Things I took for granted my entire life have new and profound meaning. Someday, I may just swallow water and not feel how good it is. I hope not. My prayer every day is to not forget how good it is to swallow water. My wish for everyone is to be grateful for swallowing water.