Quotes from Susan Gubar

The title of Kent Haruf's Our Souls at Night promised just that. I read it in a few hours, tranquilized by its tenderness for two widowed characters who find late-life intimacy in the simplest of ways.

my central motive consists of a fierce belief that something must be done to rectify the miserable inadequacies of current medical responses to ovarian cancer.

one should refrain from attributing the cause of disease to the diseased.

Knowledge clinched or confirmed always feels like a coin falling into the right slot, a ball landing in a basket, a peg knocked into its proper hole.

The shock of a sudden death, Joan Didion attests, is "obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.

The hardly noticeable symptoms of cancer pale in comparison to those produced by the surgeons determined to excise it.

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.

I am dying without death; living without life.

how does my worthless life get lived without me?

the pedagogy of pain. I am pathetically grateful to the doctors for righting the wrong they had done.

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.

According to the doctor-historian Ann Dally, "Virchow, probably the greatest pathologist of the nineteenth century, wrote, 'Woman is a pair of ovaries with a human being attached; whereas man is a human being furnished with a pair of testes.' " The French physician Achille Chereau argued that "it is only because of the ovary that woman is what she is.

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.

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.

The experts agree with them about the importance of the quality of the debulking: "there is absolutely nothing the doctor can influence, including choosing the type of chemotherapy, that affects a woman's chance of surviving her ovarian cancer as much as the quality of her initial surgery . . . Sadly, however, only between 30 and 50 percent of the women with ovarian cancer in any given geographic region will have optimal surgery." I

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.

One estimate in 1906 was that for every one of the 150,000 doctors in the U.S. there was one castrated woman; some of these doctors boasted that they had removed from 1500 to 2000 ovaries apiece." Soon feminists and antivivisectionists protested against the credo "when in doubt, take them out.

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.

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?

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.

For in the sequel to Gilead (which is really a prequel), later-life lovers must contend with the aftershocks of trauma. Love that arrives late can come after great pain, as Shakespeare knew. Yet that pain may not arrest or numb but burn or blister a later-life lover, making her wince at the touch of the hand she wants to hold. Our

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.

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.

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.