Sublime

My mother, the doctor thought, was waiting for my arrival and might not last the night. “Dying of what?” I asked him. “Nothing, everything.”

three years before my birth. In the United States, African Americans are 25 percent more likely to die of cancer than Whites. My father survived prostate cancer, which kills twice as many Black men as it does White men. Breast cancer disproportionately kills Black women.

To the degree that my quest had an object, that object turned out to be learning to live with uncertainty and incapacity.

In old age, mindfulness can increase health by saving us from a diminishing sense of authorship of our stories. In a 1976 experiment by Langer and her colleagues, a number of elderly residents in a nursing home were given houseplants to look after and water. They were also encouraged to make decisions for themselves, such as where to receive