It Wasn't Roaring, It Was Weeping: Interpreting the Language of Our Fathers Without Repeating Their Stories

by Lisa-Jo Baker

his answer is always the same: “I knew you’d do it.” Period. The end. He believes, and this almost always makes it so.

Like everything he believes, there is no alternate opinion. There is only his truth and then what everybody else thinks.

There is no us and them because there is only one beating heart of humanity—a single organism connected by vital arteries of history and memory and one divine and holy breath breathed into all of us.

We are all tourists in someone else’s history, and sometimes it’s our own.

“No,” he always says. “Anyone can check those off a list. To be a truly great doctor, you have to love people.”

Love is its own language that has to be learned. Most of us struggle to pronounce its words; some can barely speak in complete sentences. And like all languages, it is easier to learn when we are surrounded by native