Breast cancer: Family experience of illness and death

What we ask of life is that it be as beautiful as a poem. But to be beautiful, eternally, it must know how to die. It is written in the sacred text that there is a right time for everything. There is a time to be born and there is also a time to die. We learn to count the months of pregnancy and mark the day of birth. But when will we learn to recognise the moment of death? Our body knows. And it does not want to stay after its time is up. It also feels sorry for the stars, which shine without rest... I think that would be what life would say, as its last wish, if the living would listen: that the end be as calm as twilight, that it be as decisive as the last chord of a sonata, and that we know the moment has come when we meet our old lover again with the joy of someone embracing their new girlfriend... May doctors and relatives, for the love of beauty, let the poem be told, until the end. Please, do not put your finger backwards on the turntable... Time to Die (Rubem Alves - 1994).

Pagina's: 92, Paperback, Our Knowledge Publishing