Tell Me More: Stories about the 12 Hardest Things I'm Learning to Say

by Kelly Corrigan

the truth is that I’m always teetering between a mature acceptance of life’s immutables and a childish railing against the very same.

Like my mother, I resent small print, forget every password, and fear all forms.

“Accepting things as they are is difficult. A lot of people go to war with reality.”

Tracy said softly, “That must feel so unfair,” which brought to mind my friend Paul, who told me once that at cocktail parties, whenever someone tells him what they do for work he says, That must be really hard, and every time, no matter what they do, they say, Oh, it is. He started doing it because he’s shy and needs the other person to do the talking, but he kept doing it as a public service.

Listening to him gush about Jock Jankey and Noodles Nolker, it occurred to me that if this newest cancer was going to kill him, he had made good on life’s most exquisite promise: he loved and was loved in equal measure.

I’d learned to ride out my dad’s conversational detours.

Four years into her pursuit of motherhood, MH met with a new doctor, a woman, who listened to the whole story and then said, “I want to say something before we get into your medical options: You have permission to stop. No one will call you a quitter.” That was the turning point. “That one comment, that we had permission to stop, made room for us to think about other options,” MH said. That’s when she and Leon stopped asking why and started looking at alternatives.

There are exceptional people who can live with the complexity of things, who are at peace with the unknown and the unknowable. I love these people. I feel safe with them in a way that I never could with the men and women of resounding conviction, even though in the game of influencing people, saying I’m not sure or Sort of is about as winning as body odor.

Learn to say no. And when you do, don’t complain and don’t explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.

equivocating is for beginners.)

really, when you’re a grown-up, I love you is more romantic than the perfumy Je t’adore. Informed love, love that has cut across time and thwarted its pressures, is a two-ton emotion, and the plain, full statement of it often makes my throat clog with feeling.