I wondered if there was something I could have said that might have given some comfort. I was supposed to be the words guy, and I’d always believed that I could find the right ones. More and more, I was discovering that, just as Maxey’s body was failing him, words were starting to fail me. I was beginning to think that, no matter how much I trusted the power of language, there were situations in which nothing I could say would make things any better—and that what I said might even make things worse.
