My Life and My Death : A Priest Confronts His Cancer

In My Life and My Death, Episcopal priest Jeffrey T. Simmons faces his impending death from colon cancer with both surrender and resistance. His oppenness to God's will is evident in the placid wisdom with which he writes, "My greatest teacher has been my cancer," but he also can be less accommodating of his illness, fighting it as if it were the very devil. Humor is one catalyst that allows Father Simmons to alloy faithful surrender to scrappy self-reliance. Emotional directness is another. Although the emotional and theological complexity of illness is given its due, there is a candor and starkness to most of Father Simmons's memoir of diagnosis and decline that surprises the reader initially but ultimately comforts and reassures: illness (my illness) is shocking; death (my death) is shocking; God (my God) loves me. Anyone whose life has been touched by cancer will find hope, comfort, and encouragement here. Book jacket.

The Rev. Jeffrey Simmons was an Episcopal priest who served several parishes in the Diocese of Long Island and one parish in Illinois. At the time of his death in 2002, he was chaplain to St. Mary's Convent in Peekskill, New York