Sublime

She hadn’t fed for nearly two months, and I preferred her to feed this way than to gorge on a corpse. It’d been years since we first went on the run, and I still didn’t have the stomach for blood and gore. Sy often retreated after she fed, and I had to take over with my humanoid form and clean up her mess.

Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation.

Four years after it first appeared, Woolf reprinted “On Being Ill”

I’d learned how to be a student, a beginner, how to set aside my own beliefs to help others. I’d learned about patience and the power of silence.

We do not (and will not) have the resources to properly care for our increasing elderly population, yet we insist on medical intervention to keep them alive. To allow them to die would signal the failure of our supposedly infallible modern medical system.

I started by volunteering in the palliative care department at Mercy Hospital in my hometown. I was still trying cases, and I usually made time to visit the hospital on Fridays. The director of the program would give me a list of patients who’d asked for a visit, most of whom were at the end of life in some stage of dying. The patients were all ove

how reading increases empathy, decreases burnout, or even makes you a nicer person. These may be true, but for me, reading—now that I am truly a reader—has a more profound effect: it effaces the boundaries between me and my colleagues, between me and my patients, and also between me and my many selves. When I’m doing it right, reading makes me feel