Activity

Rose’s epigraph to Love’s Work—“Keep your mind in hell, and despair not”—is taken from the sayings of the Russian monk Staretz Silouan, and is glossed several times within the text. There is, for example, “the unhappiness of one who refuses to dwell in hell, and who lives, therefore, in the most st…

The person who emerges in this brief autobiography is fierce, difficult, vulnerable, and unrelenting in her will to hope and in her devotion to what she calls “the shared cares of the finite world.” When she writes, thinking of Proust (“les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus”), that “the…

The person who emerges in this brief autobiography is fierce, difficult, vulnerable, and unrelenting in her will to hope and in her devotion to what she calls “the shared cares of the finite world.” When she writes, thinking of Proust (“les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus”), that “the…

With only weeks to live, he found mixing colors too time-consuming. His last drawing was a pen-and-ink landscape—the lake and the woods beyond. Rather than draw the woods as a solid black shape, he drew the trees individually. He was getting weaker by the day and there were thousands of trees. Did …

I gave him his privacy until the sobs subsided. He had every right to cry for what was about to be taken from him.

Everything.

When I finally joined him in the bedroom, he said, “It’s hard to believe that I’m not going to be here in a few weeks.”

“You could have months,” I said.

“It’s j…