In a reverse way, sharing my mother's long, slow dying consumes my creative energy. I manage one angry and bitter story, and feel better for it, but most of me is involved in Mother's battle. Watching her slowly being snuffed out is the opposite of pregnancy, depleting instead of fulfilling: I am exhausted by conflict.

Death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.

I tell a friend that I hope for Mother's death, and he is shocked; he sees it as a failure in my love toward her. Perhaps it is. I don't know.

There're a lot of things you don't understand." Zachary smoldered his gaze at me. "I came looking for you, and then when I found out where you were, suddenly it didn't seem worth it. It wasn't you. It was everything and nothing. Life. Ma's death. Talking to anybody. Not worth it

Lords of spirit, Lords of breath,Lords of fireflies, stars, and light,Who will keep the world from death?Who will stop the coming night?Blue eyes, blue eyes, have the sight.

There was no light. The darkness was deep and there was no dazzle.

If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.

This wasn't the first time that I'd come close to death, but it was the first time I'd been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you've loved.

Carrying my babies was a marvelous mystery, lives growing unseen except by the slow swelling of my belly. Death is an even greater mystery. ... The God I cry out to in anguish or joy can neither be proved nor disapproved. The hope I have that death is not the end of all our questions can neither be proved nor disproved.