117 Quotes by Kelly Corrigan

The skin hungers for touch, from cradle to grave.

Any certainty I pretend is a performance to keep the troops calm and in line. Alone in the campaign tent, with maps spread out on the folding table, I work in pencil with shaky hands.

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

Do you know that I love you enough to take in the full reality of your lives? That I can understand the things you think I can’t and I can see and know and embrace every bit of you, full frame, no cropping?

Today, all I can say is: I don’t know what I think about God, either the one who was presented to me from behind the marble altar during my childhood or the many God-like ideas that have been offered to me since. I do know that I love many believers and I pulse with gratitude that wants a locus and I wonder about the wonders I see around me and feel inside me. But I’m not sure of anything.

We’ll bury our mothers and fathers – shuttling our children off for sleepovers, jumping on red-eyes, telling eachother stories that hurt to hear, about gasping, agonal breaths, hospice nurses, scars and bruises and scabs, and how skin papers shortly after a person passes. We will nod in agreement that it is as much an honor to witness a person leave this world as it is to watch a person come into it.

I have to pick up my kids. I have to register them for school. I have to pack their lunches and get their Hep B shots and wash their hands. They must be spotted on the stairs and potty trained and broken of the binkie. And if that relentless work runs right alongside gauging the risks of bladder surgery on a seventy-four-year-old, well, what did you think was gonna happen? What did you think being an adult was?

Like the padre said, life is a mystery to be lived. Live your mystery.

How seriously can I take myself? I’m just one of six billion people, right?