When I started medical school, my classmates and I attended a special ceremony where we stood in front of our friends, family, and professors and recited some modern version of the Hippocratic Oath. For years afterward, I only remembered the “do no harm” bit, which is a lazy approximation of the actual words. I recently reread the oath, and even though I’d completely forgotten, it also said this: “I will …
You were supposed to die of cardiac arrest as you circled toward home plate. Or of a brain aneurysm in the summer during one of your countless hikes through the mountains.
You weren’t supposed to die here. Not in a hospital bed, inhabiting this fragile new body, with an oxygen tube in your nose and tumors in your lungs.
Two days before you left us, I traveled home to visit you. I’d …
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