Love needs room to grow. Like a rose. Or a tumor.

Please don't die.

Built on the insubstantial foundation of our feelings, the life we had created together seemed a figment of our imaginations that dissolved into fairy dust in the face of something real, and deadly, like cancer.

we wept within the moment that was dividing our life into before and after, whereby the before was forever foreclosed, while the after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle-star, into a dark universe of pain.

It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy

Dying from an aggressive fatal brain tumor is like dying from Alzheimer's disease accelerated one hundred times.

This is your war now.' I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?'Some war,' he said dismissively. 'What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Graze, with a predetermined winner.

Over time, there would be less and less of him and more of the tumor. His brain was being eaten by God. He left the clinic in fine spirits. He had no intention of removing the tumor. It was the perfect solution to his dilemma: how to feed his body's desire for intimacy. He was delusional, of course. There was no higher presence filling him with love, connecting him to all things. It only felt that way. But that was fine. That was ideal. He would not have trusted a God outside his head.

He had carte blanche to eat whatever he wanted. No amount of broccoli and vitamin D kills ten lung tumors and I know not how many brain tumors. Have the tiramisu.

It’s as if everyone got cancer the day I was diagnosed, except I’m their tumor.