First Person

A Different Life

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. —Susan Sontag   A diagnosis of advanced ovarian cancer in February 2013 split my life down the middle, like an axe on wood. The person I was before that event became a stranger, the person after a stranger…

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