Well, you don’t die during the week I visit—you want as much time as you can get on the planet, and you’re getting it—but you’re so close, you say, that you can see St. Peter when you’re in the shower.

The act of writing is a tremendous adventure into the unknown, always fraught with danger. But the deeper you go and the longer you work at your art, the greater will be your treasure. Pat Schneider

I can’t remember when my late best friend started telling me this, but I do know that she mentioned it fairly often throughout the 17 years that she coped with metastasized colon cancer. “I have a grateful heart,” Georgann would say.

And so it goes, as we’ve learned, not a way of facing life but of facing death—grief tagging after us like a shadow

Tell me the story of how you came to be …