In Memory of

“The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.” ~ Joan Borysenko

 

 

As a medical student and then a physician, what drew me to older patients was, of all things, history.

How else as a young adult could I have had tangible access to witnesses to the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, and even vaudeville?

On many a late night, I sat talking to patients at their bedside who had seemingly lost the ability to long-for, desire or crave creature comforts.

But what they lacked in real-world and real-time cognition, was somehow compensated by remembering.

In our diaphanous conversations, I was sometimes the doctor, sometimes a parent, sometimes a child, and on one occasion, a paramour.

We could have danced all night—literally.

The mind is a mysterious, mysterious thing…and so is the heart.

When we celebrated our last anniversary, Josh said

Thank you for providing me more memories in the last 13 years than one person should ever have in a lifetime.

I find it oddly comforting to know that despite the tides of fortune and the flux of material things, the one thing that is most valuable and universal is memory.

Be determined to make a million of them…no matter what.