The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.

It was the relational aspect of humans—i.e., “human relationality”—that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing. There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced—of passion, of hunger, of love—bore some

knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.

“I usually take it at five A.M.,” I said. “And you know as well as I do that ‘waiting till morning’ means letting someone deal with it after morning rounds, which will be more like the afternoon. Right?”

Graham Greene once said that life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just reflection. So

I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.

My brother Jeevan had arrived at my bedside. “You’ve accomplished so much,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?” I sighed. He meant well, but the words rang hollow. My life had been building potential, potential that would now go unrealized. I had planned to do so much, and I had come so close. I was physically debilitated, my imagined future and

brains give rise to our ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. Sometimes, they break.

If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.