Phyllis Tickle faces death as she enjoys life: ‘Dying is my next career’
Phyllis Tickle has written more widely about the contours of American faith and spirituality than most in the past generation. And now, at 81, she’s working on her own final chapter.
On January 2, the day her husband of six decades, Sam, succumbed to a long and debilitating illness, Tickle found herself flat on her back with a high fever, “as sick as I’ve ever been” and racked by “the cough from hell.”
The fever eventually subsided, but the cough wouldn’t let go. When she visited the doctor in April, the diagnosis was stage IV lung cancer that had spread to her spine. The doctors told her she had four months to live, maybe six.
