Article: Seeking rapture: lessons for an apprentice saint.

My mother died of breast cancer when I was twenty-four. I took care of her while she died. I gave her her morphine, her Halcion, her Darvocet, Percocet, Demerol, Zantac, and prednisone. I bathed her and I dressed her bedsores. Though I had to force myself into such communion with disease, I kissed her each morning when she woke and each evening as she fell asleep. Then I went into the bathroom, took a cotton pad soaked with rubbing alcohol, and scrubbed my lips until they burned and bled. Sometimes as I did this I thought of Saint Catherine of Siena, who in 1373 collected into a bowl the pus from the open breast-cancer lesions of Andrea, an older member of the Mantellate ...

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