Cutting for Stone

I watched the ruddy, sweaty faces on the dance floor, the childlike brightness in their eyes; it made me sad and impatient.

“Don’t be silly. Can you imagine me giving up this?” he said sweeping his hand to indicate family, Missing, the home he’d made out of a bungalow. “I’ve been blessed. My genius was to know long ago that money alone wouldn’t make me happy. Or maybe that’s my excuse for not leaving you a huge fortune! I certainly could have made more money if that had

I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the crises that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears—the fluids in which one dissolved all traces of self.

I spent as much time as I could with Ghosh. I wanted every bit of wisdom he could impart to me. All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them. I tried.

“The master-word is Work.” Stone bound it to his forehead. He wrote it on the tablet of his heart. He woke to it and fought sleep for it. Work was his meat, his drink, his wife, his child, his politics, his religion. He thought work was his salvation, until the day he found himself seated in Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, in the room of a child he

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.

The spot no longer generated any dread for me. All my ghosts had vanished; the retribution that they sought had been exacted. I had nothing more to give, and nothing to fear.

“The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do.”

Since turning fifty, Matron had noticed such dissonances and disconnections between her thought and action; they were becoming common.