What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.

Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?" she asked. "Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?""Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.

Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.

[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture—and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.

And so it was literature that brought me back to life.

I asked him, “Can you breathe okay with my head on your chest like this?” His answer was “It’s the only way I know how to breathe.