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

Descriptions like Nuland’s convinced me that such things could be known only face-to-face.

The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?

What kind of life exists without language?

I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients—anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.

Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection.

Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning.

despondency.

Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.