Memoir of a Debulked Woman Quotes

“The words of Corinne Boyer, a Canadian woman who died of ovarian cancer a decade ago, complement the patchwork of sentiments expressed by many of the others I studied: “Is this my protest against what is happening to me? No—it is a protest about what is happening to all women. Or, more exactly, what is not happening for them. I am reconciled for myself, and anticipate the entirely spiritual life that awaits me. What I was not reconciled to—nor should anyone be—is the injustice to women in allocating such a paltry medical research budget to illnesses that are specific to women.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“By way of summary, then, I ask, what does medical knowledge do to or for women dealing with ovarian cancer? Many of us manage to appreciate the preciousness of the present moment and find a spiritual pot of gold at the end of treatment not because but in spite of medical interventions, for the state of contemporary approaches to ovarian cancer is a scandal.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Through their visual and literary lines, Rilke and Kahlo seem to attain a sense of personal equanimity by entertaining the secular import of Thomas Browne’s assertion that “there is something in us, that can be without us, and will be after us.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Rending me is an insight rendered by Mark Doty: “death’s deep in the structure of things, and we didn’t put it there.” The vision of dying as a disarmed surrender imbued Rilke with the conviction that “We need, in love, to practice only this: / letting each other go,” a difficult discipline because of the uniqueness of each living creature.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“the end of Rilke’s Duino Elegies: Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“To an avuncular visitor who says, “I want to commend you on your attitude toward your impending situation,” I fantasize a non-Buddhist response, “At least I have a life to lose, loser.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“wish to experience a tranquil dying without whining about or withstanding death. “Like birth,” my treasured collaborator Sandra warns in Death’s Door, “death is surely by its nature undignified.” True, but with the help of hospice at home I wish to avoid being cut, drained, wired, monitored, intubated, and ventilated within the artificial life support systems of an ICU. “To die ‘naturally’ is to find a way to have a graceful death when the prognosis is terminal and further treatments are of questionable value. It is not a rejection of medical science, but rather an attempt to use the sophistication of modern medicine to treat—in a different, better way—those who are seriously ill or near death.” I”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“I respect the values that imbued my personal trajectory, I must avoid the degradations and dependencies of pointless suffering. “Death has dominion,” Ronald Dworkin explains, “because it is not only the start of nothing but the end of everything, and how we think and talk about dying—the emphasis we put on dying with ‘dignity’—shows how important it is that life ends appropriately, that death keeps faith with the way we want to have lived.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“In my absence, who would cherish Molly and Simone with my ferocity and unconditional adoration of who they are, no matter what they do or become? Who would be their biggest fan?”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Numerous books have confirmed Ariès’s and Gawande’s point that we are death-deprived not only by medical and mortuary businesses but also by much more generalized social prohibitions against acknowledging dying or mourning.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“According to Philippe Ariès, “the interdiction of death in order to preserve happiness was born in the United States around the beginning of the twentieth century.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“American antipathy to discussions of mortality has recently stalled efforts to reform the health-care system. As I write, a proposal for patient-driven end-of-life consultations has been caricatured and attacked as an imposition of government-run “death panels” dedicated to euthanasia of the disabled and the elderly. Pointing to widespread opposition to any reconciliation with the inexorability of suffering and mortality, a number of commentators have claimed that Americans exhibit a national addiction to narratives of individualistic self-improvement and perseverance.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“All meditations on death should be avoided, according to Reynolds Price: “Never give death a serious hearing till its ripeness forces your final attention and dignified nod.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Remission is a word that signifies absolution. As Google will guess if you begin typing it, the term “remission of cancer” derives from and echoes “the remission of sins.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“The “peace which comes from selflessness,” Karen Armstrong explains, “is a condition that those of us who are still enmeshed in the cravings of egotism . . . cannot imagine.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“I am dying without death; living without life.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Think of those mythic or fantastic creatures granted eternal life without eternal health and youth: the Cumaean Sibyl, for instance, or the Struldbruggs in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels. Immortal but decaying and dead to affection and curiosity, Swift’s Struldbruggs may be exempt from physical termination but their unending devolution into querulous, envious, and impotent senility can only horrify Gulliver and the reader with “the dreadful Prospect of never dying.” Death has departed from their world only to leave them miserably incapacitated in a never-dying but always degenerating afterlife. “What is truly horrible is not death but the irremissibility of existence” or “the facticity of being riveted to existence without an exit,” as the philosopher Simon Critchley puts it more abstractly. The”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“To pursue my career, I had always lectured myself that no momentary hesitancy or stoppage should be called a writing block. One must simply determine to go on writing, period. “Apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair”: the mantra I learned from Sandra and recited to undergraduate and graduate students assured them that personal effort and the struggle to continue expression would win out with the reward of word following word in paragraphs and pages that reflected their thought processes and clarified themselves to themselves. But what to write about not wanting, not doing, not knowing how to get through minute by minute of this dull but fearful day, even though (thankfully) there is no pain (I try to concentrate on this), just discomfort.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“It is one thing to renounce willfulness, another to be robbed of willingness.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“how does my worthless life get lived without me?”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“While reading, I am moved by cadences and vocabularies, values and contexts tangential to or beyond me, but somehow pertinent to how I might begin to apprehend myself and the world differently or how foreign worlds I never encountered or even imagined might catch my attention and sweep me up in their sustained asymmetries.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“the pedagogy of pain. I am pathetically grateful to the doctors for righting the wrong they had done.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“The interwoven branches of the firs droop from the weight, bendable but not brittle. I want to be just as still and somehow pliable and permanent in each moment of being alive, to ponder how transient and yet how pregnant each instant feels.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“I wish to cultivate the mystic intensity of each moment alone or with others, to reflect on each second’s untold vibrancy. To make the moment of being stand still—that’s how Virginia Woolf frequently thought about her quests in consciousness. What I seek is “a willingness instead of willfulness, an ability to take life on life’s terms as opposed to putting up a big fight,” as Lauren Slater expresses it in Lying, her astonishing memoir about the impossibility of telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“I want the quiet concentration of each everyday task to fill me with an active love of living and a passive acceptance of dying,”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Tonglen (the Tibetan word that means ‘to give and to receive’) consists of accepting another’s suffering and distress, making an offering in return [with] all the confidence and serenity one can muster. This simple sharing of someone else’s suffering means being with him or her, not leaving that person alone.” Breathing in the pain of another, breathing out relief and release might whittle away at my solipsism. Tonglen is believed to be “one of the great meditation jewels that offers a way to nurture the natural energy of mercy and basic goodness.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Pema of the many umlauts”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“If there weren’t so many damned umlauts in Pema’s last name—it is a royal pain to find the damned symbol list—she might be worth consulting and quoting, for she believes that “when we encounter pain in our life we breathe into our heart with the recognition that others also feel this.” Can I learn to deepen compassion by realizing that my distress is shared, that there are many other people all over the world feeling pain worse than mine?”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“That night (as on all nights), when the lights get turned out, Don and I lie on our backs side by side with his left hand cradling my right. “I worry that this sickness is taking over your life, Bear,” I murmur in the dark now permeated by a bathroom nightlight he has just affixed. “I have no other life,” he responds while gently stroking my fingers. “I don’t know what to hope for,” I whisper. “Let’s hope for a good summer,” he says.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Terry Tempest Williams: “I look at Mother and I see myself,” she writes during her period of caretaking; or worse: “A person with cancer dies in increments, and a part of you slowly dies with them.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer