Terry Gross

And I said, that makes you unique.

So you actually have a passage related to that that I'd like you to read.

I should interrupt here and say you got sick just as the COVID lockdown was starting.

So how much relief does it give you to know that you can't blame yourself for this disease?

It wasn't your behavior that brought it on.

No one can be finger pointing, like finger wagging at you saying, I told you, you should have stopped smoking.

You wrote a memoir about grief for your wife.

In this book, I could say some of it is about grief for your own body.

And yet, you've kind of lived in fear of death your whole life.

You thought about death a lot.

You've been afraid of death.

And although your blood cancer isn't a death sentence, it's not going to help you live longer either.

You know, it will make your body more vulnerable.

So it's interesting that you felt detached when you got the diagnosis and not fearful.

The third sentence of your new book, Departures, says that your interest tends toward the ghoulish and the extreme.

So give us a couple of the examples, and why do you think that you're interested in the ghoulish and the extreme of the body?

Sick in what way?

Physically sick or like mentally?

When something extreme is happening to your own body or something tending toward the ghoulish, do you find that fascinating too or just horrifying?

But if you take him too much to heart and obsess about death every day instead of like thinking about it and thinking about it as a kind of natural part of life, that's not great.