This piece, “You Owe Me” from the Michigan Quarterly Review is truly beautiful reading and very, very interesting.. but you will cry your heart out. The writer, Miah Arnold teaches poetry and prose writing to children with cancer.
Students don’t often address their cancer directly, in the day-to-day of the classrooms. They write about thunderstorms, or animals, or when they’re being more serious, about family and the homes they left behind. However, conquering insurmountable odds and tricking fate are common themes. When they do write directly about their cancer, they don’t write poems, they write essays detailing their experience. Except when a child is about to die. Then they often choose poetry, they often speak directly to God. These poems are angry or they are hopeful.
Thanks to @kissability for the link.
“… we move into the Pedi-Dome, a giant indoor playground …and a dozen or so little fire engines and cars for the preschoolers to ride around on.”
And that is where I just about lost it. I had to read this piece in spurts.
Wow, thank you for that. Soul-wrenching and beautiful.
“Steel yourself”
Thanks. Amended.
True, but it could have also meant “steal yourself some time,” right?
That was one of the most difficult and beautiful things I have read.
Thank you so much for sharing.
This is an amazing article. I have a close friend who does work like this. He was a Captain Starlight for several years and is now a music therapist at the children’s hospitals in Sydney. He doesn’t talk much about his work and is very humble, but I know that he has played and sung to countless children just before they have died. It just blows me away.
amazing
Oh god. I cried and then cried some more. I have a friend whose 3 year old son is undergoing treatment for an aggressive brain tumour. He was born within days of my daughter. It’s all too close to home at the moment.