Kitchen Table Wisdom

I just finished reading a really, really amazing book. It's called Kitchen Table Wisdom and it was written by a doctor named Rachel Naomi Remen, who ironically lives in a town about 15 minutes from me. It is a collection of incredible short stories about her experience as a doctor in healing people, both physically or emotionally. She has an incredible gift for writing and her stories are so moving. Here is an example:

A human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each time with its own particular beauty and power. And gift. By focusing on springtime and summer, we have turned the natural process of life into a process of loss rather than a process of celebration and appreciation. Life is neither linear nor is it stagnant. It is movement from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made.

The denial of death is the most common way that we edit life. Despite the power of technology to reveal to us the nature of this world, death remains the ultimate unknown, impervious to the prodding finger of science. We might well ask if anything which cannot be addressed in scientific terms is really worthy of our attention. Yet most of the things that give life its depth, meaning and value are impervious to science.

Ever since my diagnosis I have been reading any book that I can get my hands on that might help put death in perspective. I have no intention of letting this cancer be the end of me, but at the same time I cannot deny that having cancer has opened a space in my mind where I think about death. And so I find myself trying to make sense of what death is all about and to understand where -- if anywhere -- death leads. This book is probably the closest that I have come to feeling a sense of peace about death and about life and about the true mystery of both. If you have a chance, you should definitely read it.