Quotes from 'Life Expectancy'

Some lives, conducted with grace, are beautiful arcs bridging this world to eternity. I am thirty years old and can’t for certain see the course of my life, but rather than a graceful arc, my passage seems to be a herky-jerky line

Even as the umbilical cord was tied off and cut between the Beezo baby and his dead mother, my  mother, exhausted but still struggling to expel me, suddenly and at last experienced cervical dilation.