Gone Before Goodbye

by Reese Witherspoon

It’s not that you are not genuinely concerned about your patients—you acutely are—or don’t believe in your mission—they did—but the terrible secret, the secret she and Marc and Trace shared, is that you do it to be special.

Scratch the surface of a person doing good works, and you’ll find someone who fears the mundane and conventional.

Denial comes second, not first, because those first few seconds when you comprehend the awful truth—Stage One should actually be “total understanding”—are so devastating, so awful, so painful, so debilitating that your mind forces you to move on to denial in order to survive.

So total understanding is the first stage. Then denial. Anger, bargaining, depression arrived together, a toxic concoction, one overlapping and blending with the others. You spiral. And with that comes the need to numb.

“The vast majority of humans have known very little variety in taste. Empires rose and fell, people were conquered and slaughtered, merely to add spice and flavoring to their palates. Think about it. A hundred, two hundred years ago, only the most elite of elite got to experience one or two other cultures’ food. Now all of us can walk through any city and within a mile you can eat Chinese, Indian, Thai, French, Italian. You can have lamb from New Zealand, pompano from Florida, barbecue from Texas. If you told even the richest king that would be possible, he would have never believed it. What we take for granted is nothing short of a miracle.”

Her mind is a constantly whirring thing, her brain overheating—it makes life unbearable in many ways. It makes it impossible for a man to stay with her. To love her.

“An American philosopher. He has this quote I love: ‘Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.’”

Eric Hoffer