by Guy Sayles | Dec 19, 2017 |
I’m allergic to sentimentality.I break-out in heart-hives when I brush up against counted-cross stitch samplers of motivational quotes, with greeting cards that feature babies, puppies, kittens, and balloons, and with rhyming love poems printed on a pastel background...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 4, 2017 |
This post is the last of three in which I respond to themes in Paul Kalanithi’s beautiful book, When Breath Becomes Air. Kalanithi’s said: “Severe illness wasn’t life altering; it was life-shattering” (120). I agree.To observers who don’t have (because no...
by Guy Sayles | Dec 2, 2017 |
Here is the second of three posts in which I respond, out of my own experience with serious illness, to a few themes in Paul Kalanithi’s beautiful book, When Breath Becomes Air. I ended the first with this resolve: The only way to live is to live.In tension with that...
by Guy Sayles | Nov 29, 2017 |
A friend recently invited me to meet with a book group that was reading the late Paul Kalanithi’s beautiful memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. It describes his heartbreaking but heart-mending sojourn through cancer into an all-too-early death at age 37. ...
by Guy Sayles | Nov 20, 2017 |
Maybe, later in the week, I’ll write about the numerous extraordinarily ordinary and ordinarily extraordinary gifts which are part of my everyday life and for which I am grateful. Thanksgiving’s origins, though, are civic: they have to do with the condition and...
by Guy Sayles | Nov 8, 2017 |
Saturday morning, at Barnes and Noble, I was in the café line to order my venti Hot Cinnamon Spice tea. Just ahead of me was a young family. Dad pushed a stroller with a sleeping 8 month old boy, dressed in Carolina blue inside. Mom paid gentle attention to a four...
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