Aesthetics of Sickness

During the years I had cancer, I sometimes bristled at the language of “wellness” and its trappings. I didn’t need mindfulness; I needed oxaliplatin. And, anyway, there can be little choice but to become an expert at mindfulness—at meditation as a last resort—when you’re too sick to hold a book, to hold a job, to hold a story together. You count the moments. Survival amounts to not dying moment by moment. You do not appreciate those moments more than you did when their threadbare firings, in health, steadily flared. You survive them.