If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?

Nuland was a renowned surgeon-philosopher whose seminal book about mortality, How We Die, had come out when I was in high school but made it into my hands only in medical school. Few books I had read so directly and wholly

She was a harbinger of the sub rosa, the new world awaiting me in just a few weeks.

You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”)

But it would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.

Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you’re always thinking about what you’ll be doing five years down the line.

Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.

You left me, sweet, two legacies,— A legacy of love A Heavenly Father would content, Had he the offer of;