My Life And My Death: A Priest Confronts His Cancer

In this book, Episcopal priest Jeffrey T. Simmons faces his impending death from colon cancer with both surrender and resistance. His openness to God's will is evident in the placid wisdom with which he writes, "My greatest teacher has been my cancer," but he also can be less accommodating of his illness, fighting it as if it were the very devil. Humor is one catalyst that allows Father Simmons to alloy faithful surrender to scrappy self-reliance. Emotional directness is another. Although the emotional and theological complexity of illness is given its due, there is a candor and starkness to most of Father Simmons's memoir of diagnosis and decline that surprises the reader initially but ultimately comforts and reassures illness (my illness) is shocking death (my death) is shocking; God (my God) loves me. Anyone whose life has been touched by cancer will find hope, comfort, and encouragement here.