As a final example, we have a widower remembering his wife (dead of breast cancer at age fifty-five) in these terms: “In her entire life she never got into a fight with anyone . . . She had no ego, she just blended in with the environment in an unassuming manner.” The phrase “no ego” should give us pause. Intended to lovingly convey an admirable lack of arrogance or conceit, those two little words reveal, to me, a deeper story. A healthy ego—not in the sense of superiority, but as in a stable identity, the ground of self-respect, self-regulation, capacity for good decision making, a working
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