Alua Arthur > Quotes

“I am exasperated that people believe death is the great equalizer. Yes, we all die, but we die of different causes at different rates in different ways There is nothing equal about death, except that we all do it. Death and dying are culturally constructed processes that reflect social power dynamics--they are unequal. How we die is wrapped up largely in the intersections of our identities.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“At every step in our path, some possibilities die behind us while others bloom before us, and in every transition, even the joyful ones, there is grief.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“we are witnessed, even at the end of our lives. You are seen. You are heard. Your life matters. Your death will too.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“I want to die in gratitude. I've moved fast my entire life, yet I want to saunter into my death like a tipsy woman might walk to a lover across a dark room. I go in surrender.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“Maybe what I needed, finally, was to wake up to that voice inside of me, and acknowledge, finally and fully, what it was trying to tell me:

ONE DAY YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.

It is the simplest truth of them all, and yet it is the one we fight the hardest.

We push it away. We procrastinate. Death is something that happens to other people, or else to us in a future so distant it's the same thing as "never." We prioritize all the things that matter the least at the expense of those that matter most.

People wait entire lifetimes to see the Great Wall of China until they are too sick to travel, and save the bottle of Veuve Clicquot till they can't drink anymore.

We wait till tomorrow to make that important phone call, until Friday to wear the purple lipstick, or for the summer to start working on the clubhouse for the kids. Before we know it, we have an illness, then a diagnosis, then we are knocking at death's door.

Life is now. It's right here. This is it.

The past is just a series of memories coded in the hippocampus. Tomorrow, forever a day away, is a myth and an illusion of our brain's insistence on linear time. This moment is the only one that exists. In the very next moment, you could also be gone, a memory in someone else's hippocampus.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“When we think we know, we are not pliable. We are stagnant and stuck. Opening ourselves up to the discomfort of not knowing means opening ourselves up to the magic of what may be--the place of pure boundless potential where anything is possible.”
― Alua Arthur

“Falling in love can create a paralyzing fear of death. We become so much more aware of our mortality and that of our beloved when we are in love. We fear losing them, and life holds more value and purpose. It can be terrifying. But what else matters except opening ourselves to love? It's one of the "whys" of life. It shapes our fullest, most vivid memories.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“The experiences we have while dying are universal, yet we feel most alone while journeying through it. I hope these stories show you that we are witnessed, even at the end of our lives. You are seen. You are heard. Your life matters. Your death will too.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“It’s important not to conflate others’ experience with your own, because then we give them what we would want for ourselves rather than what they need.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“Sometimes best things seem like worst things until we let life unfold to reveal what is actually best.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“My hair is dreadlocked and hangs down to the middle of my back. Several of the locs are jazzed up with gold strings, charms, and cowrie shells. I decorate my body heavily, choosing brightly colored clothes, adorning my ears and nose with many piercings, and draping my fingers and wrists with what some would consider an excess of brass and copper jewelry. I scent myself with frankincense and myrrh.

People stare at me wherever I go. Significantly more in Janna, Sri Lanka, than in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. But no matter--I'm gonna give them something worth looking at. I'm only here for a small amount of time. So I insist on taking up space in the world, in rooms, in my life, and in my relationships. I wouldn't have it any other way. I am here. This is my body. It is the place I live and also the place where I will die.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“We can spend our lives fretting about our deaths, or we can use our brief time to sink deeper into the experience of being human, for all it entails. The good, the tricky, the impermanent. We can acknowledge our death will one day come and use that knowledge to create a life so whole, so honest, so juicy, that it is worth leaving. I have seen over and over human beings' personal reckonings in the final moments of life. It begs the question: What must I do to be at peace with myself so that I may live presently and die gracefully?

Without our deaths, none of it would matter. There would be no context for what we do. When we live in relationship to our mortality, it adds direction to our actions, truth to our words, rapture to our experience, authenticity to our being, and maybe pounds to our hips. We can make choices that resonate with the core of our being, free from societal expectations and the judgment of others.

While our lives and choices may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, they are not. With the dizzying serendipity that must occur for us to be born, the fact that we live is a miracle.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“The war analogy is so embedded in our language about disease. We say people
"fight" cancer, or "lose" their lives, as though our bodies are not nature itself engaging in the regular ole cycle of birth, decay, and eventually death. When we use language of battle, we make winners and losers out of people we love when in reality, their bodies are either responding to treatment or not. Plenty of people who want to "win" against cancer still die.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“At this very moment, I am the youngest I will ever be again, and also the oldest I’ve ever been. I’m human. I was born. I will age. Not aging means I am dead.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“It didn't matter, in the end, that married life wasn't my dream. It was Cosmopolitan magazine's. It belonged to the patriarchy and society. I was grieving the idea of a life that had never been mine, but still, I grieved. Cultural norms are like lead in our drinking water--you can be aware of their presence, but that doesn't make you any less sick.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“Empathy feels virtuous, but just like any intense emotional experience, it can be a sort of addiction. It has been for me.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“My presence in this field is important, because when deathcare is done without awareness of difference, privilege, and bias, it can be used as a weapon, further marginalizing communities and people at one of the rawest, most excruciatingly painful moments of their lives.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“That is what I wish for all of us: a life that feels like the miracles it is and a death that serves as a period on a satisfying sentence. Because we live, we get to die. That is a gift.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“Falling in love sometimes feels like tripping over yourself. It’s one of life’s big messy adventures, and one of my greatest joys. Over a lifetime of relationships, I’ve become a connoisseur of its many stages. That deep belly-tickle at discovering rapport with a promising stranger—the hint of recognition, the surge of chemicals. Ooooh, he cute-cute. Then their intoxicating smell, slowly becoming familiar; the whisper of a private nickname as lips brush the ear. The gradual softening into a relationship, as falling in love expands into love, the enduring kind. The body, heart, and psyche are forever changed, and that love stays on in us till we die.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“We don’t lose all the parts of ourselves because we are dying. We become more of who we are.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“As I learned more through news stories, I ached for the deaths of untold others, who often suffered alone and without family.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“Desperation is often fertile soil for faith.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“Change is the god that we must bow to.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“Home” has always been a fleeting concept for me, and I’ve had to learn to cultivate it in my body.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“Dead leaves fall from the trees and nurture the soil.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“Empathy feels virtuous, but just like any intense emotional experience, it can be sort of an addiction.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“The only thing in our control is how we choose to engage with our mortality once we become aware of it.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“All we know is that everything ends. Our collective death denial inspires us to behave like we can live forever. But we don't have forever to create the life we want.”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End

“But the idea of death is a seed. What that seed is carefully tended, life grows like wildflowers in its place. The only thing in our control is how we choose to engage with our mortality once we become aware of it. Cuba is when I became aware. If you are not yet aware, what in the world are you waiting for?”
― Alua Arthur, Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End