On Living Quotes

“When someone tells you the story of their suffering, they are probably still suffering in some way. No one else gets to decide what that suffering means, or if it has any meaning at all. And we sure as hell don't get to tell someone that God never gives anybody more than they can handle or that God has a plan. We do not get to cut off someone's suffering at the pass by telling them it has some greater purpose.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“Every one of us will go through things that destroy our inner compass and pull meaning out from under us. Everyone who does not die young will go through some sort of spiritual crisis, where we have lost our sense of what is right and wrong, possible and impossible, real and not real. Never underestimate how frightening, angering, confusing, devastating it is to be in that place. Making meaning of what is meaningless is hard work. Soul-searching is painful. This process of making or finding meaning at the end of life is what the chaplain facilitates.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“Kindness is not the same as niceness, or putting our heads in the sand, or avoiding conflict. It is acknowledging that no life is as it seems on the surface. It is understanding that we never know all the layers in a life, and choosing to speak and act from that difficult gray place in all of us.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“We shower so much love on babies and children,"she said. "But as we grow up, it stops. No one showers love on grown-ups. But I think we need more love as we get older, not less. Life gets harder, not easier, but we stop loving each other so much, just when we need love most.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“I think it's because it's startling every time - every single time - that such beauty and such loss coincide in every life, in every soul, in every memory.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“You know what I do all day long as I lie here?” she said. “I try to be loveful.” I asked her what she meant. “We shower so much love on babies and children,” she said. “But as we grow up, it stops. No one showers love on grown-ups. But I think we need more love as we get older, not less. Life gets harder, not easier, but we stop loving each other so much, just when we need love most. I—” Her voice caught in her throat, but she took a big breath and kept going. “I need more love now that I’m so old. I need love.” She lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes, out of breath. In another few seconds, she opened her eyes again. “One day, when I was lying here, I realized how old God is. He is so old. He must need so much love. People are always demanding so much from him, but who is there to shower him with love? So I thought that was something I could do. That’s what I do all day: I try to love God. I lie here and try to make my heart burst with so much love. I can lie here and love God and maybe it will help him.” She sighed heavily and her eyelids fluttered. She promptly fell asleep. I”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“Become who you want to be while you can enjoy it. Don’t put off doing the work of becoming who you want to be. Waiting will not make it easier, and time is short.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“When your ability to determine what is real is taken away by a drug, it's terrifying. But it's far worse when it's denied to you by other people.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“I say it sometimes to my daughter, who feels things so deeply. “There’s always a solution, sweetheart. You just haven’t imagined it yet.” I don’t know why I say it, because it has never comforted her. “You always say that, but in this case, THERE IS NOT!” she replies. I guess I want it to seep in somewhere deep in her subconscious, so that someday, when she is up against something truly awful, when the rug is pulled out from under her, some part of her will remember: that there is always a solution, that suffering is not forever, that some meaning can be found in even the direst of situations. I”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“people talk to the chaplain about their families because that is how we talk about God. That is how we talk about the meaning of our lives. That is how we talk about the big spiritual questions of human existence. We”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“But maybe, in seeing that other people have done it, you’ll find your own way to let your life be kind to you.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“We shower so much love on babies and children,” she said. “But as we grow up, it stops. No one showers love on grown-ups. But I think we need more love as we get older, not less. Life gets harder, not easier, but we stop loving each other so much, just when we need love most. I—” Her voice caught in her throat, but she took a big breath and kept going. “I need more love now that I’m so old. I need love.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living: Dancing More, Working Less and Other Last Thoughts

“There are many regrets and many unfulfilled wishes that patients have shared with me in the months or weeks before they die. But the time wasted spent hating their bodies, ashamed, abusing it or letting abused-- the years, decades, or in some cases whole lives that people spent not appreciating their body until they were so close to leaving it--are some of the saddest...

It's something other people teach us to feel about our bodies...

Either way, the result of the message is the same: lives lived thinking that bodies are something to criticize, to despise, or at best something to tolerate. A problem that cannot be solved.

Too often, it's only as people realize that they will lose their bodies that they finally appreciate how truly wonderful the body is.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“They talk about the love they felt and the love they gave. Often they talk about the love they didn't receive or the love they didn't know how to offer, or about the love they withheld or maybe never felt for the ones they should have loved unconditionally....

What I didn't understand when I was a student...is that people talk to the chaplain about their families because that is how we talk about God. That is how we talk about the meaning of our lives. That is how we talk about the big spiritual questions of human existence.
We don't live our lives in our heads, in theology and theories. We live our lives in our families, the families we are born into, the families we create, the families we make through the people we choose as friends. This is where we create our lives, this is where we find meaning, and this is where our purpose becomes clear.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“When people tell their stories again and again, turning them over and over, they’re trying to make or find meaning in them. That meaning is something they have to discover for themselves. As painful as the process might be, there is no circumnavigating it, either with the most thoughtful ideas you can offer or with the most hackneyed clichés. The meaning a person finds will almost never be the same one you can come up with. It will always be richer, more nuanced, more surprising.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“Kindness is not the same as niceness or putting our heads in the sand, or avoiding conflict. It is acknowledging that no life is as it seems on the surface. It is understanding that we never know all the layers in a life and choosing to speak and act from that difficult gray place in all of us.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“If you want to be saved from your present suffering, you must be willing to change and be changed in the present. That change can be tangible—leaving an abusive relationship, going back to school, moving down the hallway in an assisted-living facility. But it can also be a change in perception. This, in fact, is the harder change. A change of perception to knowing you are enough, and have been since birth, to seeing a world suffused in love and swimming in beauty, despite loneliness, despite pain, despite illness, loss, trauma, and even atrocity—now that’s hard. That seems impossible. Yet it happens, again and again, and again.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“God never calls you to do something without also giving you the ability to complete it.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“If you think it'd not work to stay steady, to remain present, to not pull back in the face of terrible suffering, then you have never been in the face of terrible suffering. It's something I've failed at. I try not to flinch, I try not to be overwhelmed, I try not to run away. But I have.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“Because that’s what secrets are about—shame. Shame, along with the belief that keeping a secret will protect you or someone else, comes from the idea that there is some part of us so monstrous, so terrible, so inhuman, that it must not be known.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“It’s discovered through these acts of love. If God is love, and I believe that to be true, then we learn about God when we learn about love. The first, and usually the last, classroom of love is the family. The”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“We listen to the stories that people believe have shaped their lives. We listen to the stories people choose to tell, and the meaning they make of those stories.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“If you want to be saved from your present suffering, you must be willing to change and be changed in the present. That change can be tangible—leaving an abusive relationship, going back to school, moving down the hallway in an assisted-living facility. But it can also be a change in perception. This, in fact, is the harder change. A change of perception to knowing you are enough, and have been since birth, to seeing a world suffused in love and swimming in beauty, despite loneliness, despite pain, despite illness, loss, trauma, and even atrocity”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“If you want to be saved from your present suffering, you must be willing to change and be changed in the present.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“I thought regret was a failure, something to avoid at all costs. It is, in fact, a window. It’s an unasked-for chance, an uncomfortable prompt, a painful encouragement to imagine what else could be. If you let it, regret can be a vehicle to hope. But you have to accept it first. You have to hold it up to the light streaming in from those leaded casement windows, in order to see clearly what it is that you wish was different in your life.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“Life is a million choices, and every choice is a choice not to do something else, and so regrets accrue with life. It’s inevitable.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“when we call someone needy, it really means that we don’t have the time, the energy, the inclination, or the capacity to meet their need. We blame the need, or worse, the person with the need, instead of the lack of time, energy, inclination, or capacity.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“When you talk to hundreds of people who are dying and looking back over their lives, you come to realize something startling: Every single person out there has a crazy story. Every single person has some bizarre, life-shattering, pull-the-rug-out-from-under-you story in their past, or will experience one in their future. Every shopper in the grocery store, every telemarketer on the phone, every mother at school pickup, every banker striding down the sidewalk. Money, faith, popularity, beauty, power—nothing prevents it.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“Inever did become wise. Y’always think that when you get old, you’re supposed to become wise. But here I am, fixin’ to die, and I never did.” Gloria’s milky blue eyes widened and she raised her eyebrows. She laughed, just a little bit.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living

“Promise yourself,” she said that last time we met, “promise that you’ll have a great life, no matter what happens.”
― Kerry Egan, On Living