What would you do if you were diagnosed with terminal cancer? Or, what are you doing right now if you have it already? Or, what are you thinking if you know someone facing it, or you are currently caring for them? Are you fighting it? Do you have a positive attitude? Or, to the contrary, are you accepting it: acknowledging that you cannot win so you might as well not resist? Are these the only choices? Your answers probably depend upon age, and circumstance, and where you are from. What do you think are the right narratives or metaphors to help you explain what looks like the end of life, for however long it might last? Some people run marathons or race for the cure. Some people write books. Terry Tempest Williams has written two memoirs about the illness and death of her mother Diane at the age of fifty-four. Williams continues to look to the natural world, to birds in particular, in order to try to come to terms with loss and life at its end. From the publication of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place in 1991 to When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice in 2012, Williams has inhabited the metaphor of women as birds and nature as a guide to both life and death. These two memoirs are, for me, both inspiring and infuriating.

My wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of thirty-one. We chose to engage with chemotherapy as far as it would go. When she died, less than six months later, our daughter was only nine months old. I, too, have tried to come to terms, if not blows, with terminal cancer. I have run marathons and written a book, although it is not a memoir. I am drawn to Williams's writing, to her advocacy, to her passion for speaking out, for her willingness to keep on resisting when it comes to working for environmental protection and an end to human suffering on a global scale, while the U.S. government continues to wage war on “terror.”