MSI Press Blog

  We often confuse the soul with the mind, or the body. But they are not the same. The mind can falter. The body can writhe in pain. And yet the soul may still be present—intact, luminous, enduring. This is one of the great tragedies of being human: when the mind decays or the body suffers long before the soul has left it. When the person we love is still here, but unreachable. When their body remains, but their joy, their clarity, their ease have vanished. Weep. Weep for the cruelty of it. Weep for the long goodbye. Weep for the moments that should have been gentle but were not. But do not despair. Because the soul is not so easily broken. It does not vanish with memory loss or tremble at physical pain. It may be quiet, but it is not gone. It may be hidden, but it is not erased. Sometimes, the soul waits. Sometimes, it endures. Sometimes, it teaches us how to love without answers, without reciprocity, without ease. To love someone whose mind has unraveled or whose bod...

  They weren’t close before. Just two of my neighbors, one downstairs, one in the next lot. Young mothers in their mid-thirties, each with two children, each newly diagnosed—one with uterine cancer, one with lymphoma. Now they spend long evenings together. Drinking. Laughing. Talking about men, though both are married. Not about cancer. Never about cancer. They slip into a kind of fantasy hour—where the diagnoses don’t exist, where their bodies haven’t betrayed them, where they’re still the girls they used to be. Or maybe the girls they never got to be. It’s not denial in the dramatic sense. It’s something softer, sadder. A shared numbness. A counter-life. They get drunk too fast to talk about anything real. And maybe that’s the point. The rest of us—neighbors, friends, watchers—feel the pull. We want to speak. We want to say, Please don’t wait too long. But we also know they won’t hear it. Not now. Not in this fragile world they’ve built together. So we hover in the silence...

There are salt lamps glowing in the bedrooms again. For five long months, their light bulbs burned out one by one, quietly surrendering to the dark as I didn’t have the time — or the clarity — to replace them. There was no time for anything outside the urgent, consuming task of caring for my husband Carl as he moved through the final stage of his life. It started with a fall. A routine day, until it wasn't. Tests led to more tests, and the doctors came back with something I wasn’t prepared for — stage 4 cancers. Not one, but five: liver, lung, skin, bone, and stomach. Cancer of unknown primary. Nothing they could point to. Everything failing at once. He lived five more months. At first, we tried chemotherapy. When it failed, we shifted to palliative care. I say “we,” but it was me who made those shifts, who bore the weight of each medical decision, each adjustment, each indignity he faced. And it was me who stayed awake at night, while others slept, making sure Carl didn’t fall, di...