I think men are the coolest, but you don't really need them to live. My mom said to me, 'You know, sweetheart, one day you should settle down and mar… - Cheryl Strayed

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away.

When I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. ROBERT PINSKY, “Samurai Song” Never never never give up. WINSTON CHURCHILL

...the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.