I made an error in the last blog, and although I corrected it later in the day, by that time 79 people had read the entry with the mistake.  The essay that focuses on working with terminally ill children at M. D. Anderson was "You Owe Me" by Miah Arnold.  I confused it with Dudley Clendinen's description of living with Lou Gehrig's disease, "The Good Short Life."  Clendinen's article is unconvincingly upbeat in part because no symptoms have yet developed as he writes and also because he has, he assures us, planned his own suicide, which he appears confident he will have the means and physical abilities to carry out before the disease becomes severe.  There is also a touching narrative, "My Father/My Husband," by David J. Lawless about living with his wife of fifty years who has Alzheimer's and no longer knows who he is.  Although I said the Best American Essays of 2012 was varied, I realize now that at least five of the articles concern medicine and disease--memoirs and analysis.

The literary critic Susan Gubar is also blogging about living with terminal cancer.  Rather than your having to read me today, I'm going to provide a link to "For the Birds," one of her blogs about the responses to her cancer that she gets from others.  Believe me:  I've gotten them all as well.  And her blog seems particularly relevant since Saturday night I had a strange encounter with a friend and colleague who had lost his wife recently to cancer.  "How are you doing?" I said.  And the response was a surprising monologue about how he hoped I was strong because the end was going to be uglier and more painful than I could imagine, that he hoped Mohamed was prepared for how awful it was going to be for him, and on and on.  Although I realize he is still grieving, I was rather taken aback by the vehemence of his response. 

And so here's Gubar's clever and apt essay:  http://nyti.ms/YDpz8T