“What is there to say of mortality? My friend died of glioblastoma, three years after his diagnosis. Forty years ago, we spent three months in a blue tent pitched by a stream below Blackcap Mountain in the Sierra Nevada. Blue scorpion venom: he and his wife traveled to Cuba during his illness, twice, to bring this treatment home; a few times I administered the drops into his nostrils. Persimmon pudding: near the end, when the time for trying restricted eating as treatment was over, I made one, with persimmons from another friend's tree. My friend ate it happily. As meanwhile all of us who loved him took in gratefully, greedily, his words, his dearness, his unshakeable love of this world, and of us.”
—Jane Hirshfield