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21 " Thank you for the taco casserole. It worked even better than my stool softeners. Thoughts and prayers are great, but Ativan and pot are better. Thank you for the flowers. I hope they die before I do. All your phone messages about how not knowing exactly what’s going on with me has stressed you out really helped me put things in perspective. Xanax is white, Zofran is blue, steroids make me feel like throttling you. "
― , The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying
22 " My friends ask a new kind of question: How is today? I hope the pain is manageable today. "
23 " I love that she could go her whole life ardently loving purple, and then shift to an equally passionate affinity for orange less than a week before she died. It’s exactly like her: She had strong opinions but was never afraid to change them—to evolve or retract or alter. Her favorite way to start a sentence—“You know what your problem is?”—was closely rivaled by “You know what I was wrong about? "
24 " Also there was this—something we came to understand together much later: her desperately needing to still be my mom, my desperately needing to prove to her how much I didn’t need a mom. "
25 " A bus. A cough. A rusty nail: Death sits near each one of us at every turn. Sometimes we are too aware, but mostly we push it away. Sometimes it looks exactly like life. Orange: The colors of the sky are the same when the sun rises as when it disappears. "
26 " It’s hard to say exactly how the pain shapes my days; it is as variable as the weather, as tomatoes, as a child. Sometimes it finds me with the first turn in bed; sometimes only after too long at a party; sometimes it is all that I am—my truest self—and other times I only recognize it on the faces and stoops of others enough to say its name. Pain—you are a cipher as well. "
27 " The drenched backyard full of runoff, and tiny, slimy, uncertain yard critters who had expected to remain buried in months of hard mud, peeking their heads out into the balmy New Year’s air, asking, Wait, what? "
28 " There: I discover a packet of unopened grief. My mother. I try to soft-belly breathe.It is unexpected for her to find me here in Paris, but there is is. Somehow, an ocean away from my dad and the kids and almost everyone we know makes the distance away that she is feel even more boundless and profound. "
29 " Morning was always Nina’s favorite time of day. Before she got sick, she used to bounce out of bed at first light, and she insisted on open blinds when we went to bed, even if we were in a hotel with an eastern exposure in the desert. So it seemed fitting that she died at 6 a.m. on February 26, just before the sun came up. "
30 " Reveal the pain, but hide the wreckage. I can hear Montaigne hollering: break it open, look inside, feel it, write it down. "