I was surprisingly touched and moved by the portrait given in this article in Esquire Magazine.  The Pulitzer Prize winning film critic has not been able to talk or eat or drink for three years now.  And yet, he seems to have found a deeper freedom in the power of the word.  He’s become no less of an atheist or a liberal, but he seems to have taken on that wisdom that those for whom had a great deal of suffering, find.  It reminds me of talks with both of my parents before they died.  Not particular conversations, but the drum beat of what they hoped to leave behind for me.  The real value of life.  What loss is, what our responsibility is, and how to be content.

In his dreams, his voice has never left. In his dreams, he can get out everything he didn’t get out during his waking hours: the thoughts that get trapped in paperless corners, the jokes he wanted to tell, the nuanced stories he can’t quite relate. In his dreams, he yells and chatters and whispers and exclaims. In his dreams, he’s never had cancer. In his dreams, he is whole.

These things come to us, they don’t come from us, he writes about his cancer, about sickness, on another Post-it note. Dreams come from us.

Read the article.  I think you’ll find it moving, too.  And I’m reminded again that this is what illness teaches us, when it is our own, or another’s:

There’s not enough time to write down what he’s angry about

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/roger-ebert-0310-4#ixzz0fmj6uSmN