Samantha Albert
I Met Death on the Avenue Road Bus A MEMOIR
“The last time I thought I was dying, I made pickles.” So opens Samantha Albert’s powerful, tenderly humorous memoir of a life lived in the shadow of death.
Like most young couples, Sam and her husband had plans and dreams: fulfilling careers, a beautiful home, a baby or two, family camping trips. Everything was going to plan until a single sentence overturned their world:
“I have your results back.”
Sam’s rare, life-threatening illness devastated both her body and the vision she had had for her life. Over the ensuing two decades, she managed to outlive dire prognoses so many times she began to refer to herself, with trademark wit, as a “serial death anticipator.” But she also became a stunning embodiment of grace. Not the shimmering romantic kind, but the kind that emerges when your life has been bound, crushed and restricted. Sam chose to offer kindness in every gesture and exchange. To use her strength to make others laugh. To weave her love into a tapestry of beauty. And to make pickles.
How does one find purpose in life while lying draped on the couch like a parasitic fern? How can a couple navigate the cracks in a relationship under the steam pressure of illness? How can one be a perfect mother when she is away or exhausted much of the time? How can one live with confidence when death is a regular visitor?
I Met Death on the Avenue Road Bus is not a book about illness but rather an answer to the question so many people must face: How do we live the life we have rather than the one we hoped for?
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Waiting An Anthology of Essays
An excerpt from I Met Death on the Avenue Road Bus appears in Waiting: An Anthology of Essays from the University of Alberta Press.
About the Book
Waiting, that most human of experiences, saturates all of our lives. We spend part of each day waiting—for birth, death, appointments, acceptance, forgiveness, redemption. This collection of thirty-two personal essays is as much about hope as it is about waiting. Featuring literary voices from the renowned to the emerging, this anthology of contemporary creative nonfiction will resonate with anyone who has ever had to wait.
Contributors: Samantha Albert, Rona Altrows, Sharon Butala, Jane Cawthorne, Weyman Chan, Rebecca Danos, Patti Edgar, John Graham-Pole, Leslie Greentree, Edythe Anstey Hanen, Vivian Hansen, Jane Harris, Richard Harrison, Elizabeth Haynes, Lee Kvern, Anne Lévesque, Margaret Macpherson, Alice Major, Wendy McGrath, Stuart Ian McKay, Lorri Neilsen Glenn, Susan Olding, Roberta Rees, Julie Sedivy, Kathy Seifert, Cora Siré, Steven Ross Smith, Anne Sorbie, Glen Sorestad, Kelly S. Thompson, Robin van Eck, Aritha van Herk
