Vigils begin

"The arrival of the fear is not unwelcome, though. It shows me that for a moment, the fear was gone."

"I meet a fellow in training in intensive care who hates the pictures the families bring and show or tape to the walls, vacation snapshots or wedding photos, the patients beaming and well in better times, enjoying the silence of their organs. If I see that they are really human, he says, I cannot be objective. I won’t try to change your mind, I tell him, but there is no such thing as objective. Relying on what you decide to call pure reason means only that you leave your bias unexplored. That’s fine, he says, his tone uninvested. My mind will never change on this. Imagine believing that, I mean about anything."

"He saved my life, I think, by letting me love him. And once you save someone, you always will have done it."

"Sometimes I see plainly that the mind is only noise, and I find a way to live mostly underneath the din." ~Our Long and Marvelous Dying, Anna Deforest MD