The elevator door slid shut as Karen and I plunged into a kiss.

“Maybe we’re the first people to make out on the way to chemotherapy.” I joked.

Karen had metastatic lung cancer to the brain. Doctors gave her seven months. Adding one more blow, my business collapsed the same day she collapsed in my arms, leaving us with four mortgages and no income. Her dream career was set to begin in four days.

She lived nine more triumphant years.

Illness as Love Affair is the story of how we did it: oncologists, folk healers, mystics, a surfer patient advocate, a researcher in an Italian village, a guru from India, a few quacks, a Cherokee medicine man, and a ton of friends. More importantly, our marriage grew stronger after surviving infidelity, a two-year separation, and nearly losing everything..

Spiritual seekers since our twenties, we discovered the secret ingredient: a terminal illness can crack the heart open.

For readers of The Year of Magical Thinking and When Breath Becomes Air, this memoir explores faith, fate, and the love that outlasts death.

Bruce Miller is the author of six books, a screenwriter, and a key figure in bringing Rumi’s work to America.

• 274 pages
• 40 photos and graphics

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“Heartfelt, comedic, irreverent, spiritual,
and as deep as it gets… It is a treasure.”
~ Carol Elizabeth Cox, author
“Learning to Live with my Disembodied Husband”
—
“A raw and unflinching journey,
one that has the power to help unravel
the mysteries of life and death”
~ Tracey Schmidt, author
“I Have Fallen in Love with the World”