I’ve waited my whole life to give someone a good death. Presence grows out of absence. As I lay dying as a teenager, my family reacted like marionettes with their strings cut. I was dying but I was much more alive than the stiffs who surrounded me, people who loved me but who could not act on their love. So it is with a fierce energy, a tremendous passion, that I approach the sickness and death of others. What I was not given, I give in spades. I have the words, the actions,

Hold off, Death, I say, Not for me today, Not for the immediate future. I walk away healthy from the cancer clinic. I walk away healthy...

Even before I confronted death at age 15, I had tastes, desires, and a temperament that did not fit. I danced, and sang, and immersed...