while reading, i felt like if i put my hand over my heart, i would be able to feel the warmth from this book. I also have a hard cover copy of the book and love Sooki's stunning paintings on the glossy front and back cover.

All across the country clinical trials were being postponed or abandoned in an attempt to deal with the overflow of patients being treated for COVID-19. What I’ll take away from this is a feeling of warmth that emanates from the author and how she is prepared to stand up for what she thinks is right. A typical Patchett piece is a eulogy, suitably warm and affectionate, respectful to those who have died, or are about to die. Sooki said she’d heard about it, too, and knew other cancer patients who’d tried it, but she was hesitant, as any right-minded adult would be hesitant about adding the X factor of fungi into an already complicated chemical mix.

There was no reason to offer unsolicited opinions on a subject I knew nothing about to a person who had just gotten into my car, but the thought of a frozen gel pack on my own head struck me as boundless misery. What if you come to Nashville to take part in a clinical trial for recurrent pancreatic cancer only to be killed by a tornado? There are numerous outstanding editorial reviews all over the Internet …(personally I didn’t view them until after I took my own turn listening to this book). It’s an essay about the complexity of life and relationships, of how we each have something different to offer each other at various stages in our life. But if you love eloquence and wisdom, and listening to a voice of an author that quickly becomes a dear friend, then I give the audiobook my highest recommendation.

I was packing boxes, writing cards, and making cheerful videos in which I extolled the virtues of the books I loved. I leave the house at 6:30 am every weekday morning to make it down to the bottom basement—floor 2B—at UCLA’s Westwood Medical Center by 7:30 am. for as many times as the horrible thing happens, a thousand times in every day the horrible thing passes us by. They told me the story later: How after they landed, when they were all standing together on the lawn outside the small airport, a police officer came and told them they had to disperse.

After dinner that night, Sooki and I sat on the couch and tried to watch a movie, but her phone on its leash began to ding and ding and ding, insisting on her attention. I would be in and out, other people would spend the night, which would be fine, plenty of room for everyone. It’s like you’re going home to the Ukraine for the first time in ten years,” I said as we loaded up coolers and bags. The other partners in his clinic asked him to stay home and practice telemedicine until there was a better sense of how the pandemic would be resolved.

Some years all we’ve managed to do is exchange birthday cards, while other years we’ve talked on the phone every week. Implicit in the idea of everyone getting together was the reality that this could be the last time it would happen. Tom Hanks was so completely absent from our conversations that I once asked her if he knew where she was. Small, flat islands of boiled wool were resolutely attached to her scalp by the 2 percent of hair that had not fallen out.The plan was that she would go home to Los Angeles during her weeks off, and once UCLA started the trial, she could go home permanently. High-dose psilocybin produced large decreases in clinician- and self-rated measures of depressed mood and anxiety, along with increases in quality of life, life meaning, and optimism, and decreases in death anxiety. While they all enriched her life in so many ways, I loved the relationship with her father that she only saw one week a year as she was growing up as she and her sister, Heather, flew to California, all of them crying unconsolably as they had to part. I think I am a bad audience for memoir-ish personal essay collections, the only ones I remember truly loving being anything by James Baldwin and Man Without a Country.