How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

by David Brooks

I recently read about a professor named Nancy Abernathy who was teaching first-year med students, leading a seminar on decision-making skills, when her husband, at age fifty, died of a heart attack while cross-country skiing near their Vermont home. With some difficulty, she managed to make it through the semester and carried on with her teaching. One day she mentioned to the class that she was dreading teaching the same course the next year, because each year, during one of the first sessions of the course, she asks everybody to bring in family photos so they can get to know one another. She wasn’t sure if she could share a photo of her late husband during that session without weeping. The course ended. Summer came and went, and fall arrived and, with it, the day she dreaded. The professor entered the lecture hall, full of trepidation, and sensed something strange: The room was too full. Sitting there, along with her current class, were the second-year students, the ones who had taken her class the year before. They had come simply to lend their presence during this hard session. They knew exactly what she needed, and didn’t need to offer anything more. “This is compassion,” Abernathy later remarked. “A simple human connection between the one who suffers and one who would heal.”