My Own Country Quotes

“If Norman had found a way, had stumbled on a path--or, indeed, if he had not found a way--then I wanted to know. I was after something more intimate, something less elegant and Kübler-Ross's stages of denial, anger, bargaining, grieving and acceptance. I simply wanted to know how to accomplish a good death.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“I felt sorry that he had suffered so long in the hospital, sorry that even in his last minutes our mindless technology had so rudely interrupted his transition”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“He had become my poster boy, a walking testament to how will and belief can make up for lack of muscle, how anger can overcome blindness.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“I realized that I could have done more for him if I had been in his house. I would have pushed morphine--large doses. Morphine disconnects the head from the body, makes the isthmus of a neck vanish and diminishes the awareness of suffering. It is like a magic trick: the head on the pillow, at peace, while the chest toils away.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“I believe that geography is destiny,”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and its People in the Age of AIDS

“Luther did not believe that HIV was killing him. He believed that our inability to treat the symptoms that bothered him, our prescribing the wrong medications, was at the root of his problem. I almost believed him: Maybe if we could put together the right concoctions we could give him ten good years.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“I was thinking back to my own childhood in Ethiopia. The church services of our small Christian Indian community were interminable and conducted in an ancient language, Syriac. My parents and the other Indian Christians in Ethiopia knew the liturgy by heart, it was what they had grown up with. And to stand together in an Ethiopian church that they rented, to worship together in a language that could be traced to St. Thomas and to Jerusalem, was an affirmation of who they were, a connection to a corner of India so far away from Africa.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“Now the hurt, angry and scared little boy was easy to spot behind the mawkish facade. Carol and I made calls and got Raleigh admitted to a halfway house where he could stay temporarily. I called Fred Goodson and had him come see Raleigh and bring him into their newly formed support group. Though we had given Raleigh information about TAP and the support group, it had probably been too much to expect him to follow up on his own. In putting Raleigh under Fred’s care, I had as secure a feeling as if I had put him in professional therapy. Joyce, my secretary at the VA, explored a job-training possibility for Raleigh.

What had happened to Raleigh was a forceful reminder to me that there was a lot I could do, a lot I had to do, for our patients even if we had no therapy for HIV. I could no longer sit and be the consultant and pontificate over the progression (or lack thereof) of the disease; I was providing primary care, total care for this group of patients, whether I liked it or not.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“You know, when I caught him with my sister, what I had done is drive out to the store and then before I got there, I turned around and coasted home, cutting the engine off so they couldn't hear. And sure enough, her car was right there. I just bust in there and let them both have it. I remember I took my ring and threw it at him. It was the worst moment of my life.

And then no more than two weeks later we're back together and he's sleeping with me. And I was thinking, ‘How does this man have the nerve to sleep with me again when he knows I can just slice it off with my knife and hand it back to him and say that's what you get for sleeping around?’

Abraham, I don't understand how he was able to attract those women, how I even forgave him. Why, he hardly spoke a word – he was backward, to tell you the truth. And I don't know why I still love him, but I do.

It's almost like I'm still looking for him. I'll be driving and I'll see a dark-haired man with a mustache and my head will spin, as if it might be him. It's the strangest thing, Abraham.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“The paper was the beginning, a rough start on a larger story, the story of how a generation of young men, raised to self-hatred, had risen above the definitions that their society and upbringings had used to define them. It was the story of the hard and sometimes lonely journeys they took far from home into a world more complicated than they imagined and far more dangerous than anyone could have known. There was something courageous about this voyage, the breakaway, the attempt to create places where they could live with pride.

No matter how long I practice medicine, no matter what happens with this retrovirus, I will not be able to forget these young men, the little towns they came from, and the cruel, cruel irony of what awaited them in the big city.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“Most gay men have traveled to several countries, have seen the best shows, movies, plays, have taken an interest in art, in their clothes, in the way their house is decorated, have experienced more of this world than any heterosexual. To me, a heterosexual male is a slob. If he gets divorced the walls of his house will stay as bare as when he first moved in, and it will be dirty, dirty, dirty. If he gets married, that's it – he has no desire to improve himself past that. His idea of a good time is to get a six-pack and park his truck on the side of the road with his buddy and drink. He might beat his wife, be mean to his kids and ultimately die where he was born having seen nothing, done nothing. But, by God, the one thing he knows is how he feels about queers! When he sees a queer he can look down on him, feel contempt, beat up a queer because it's justified.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“My friend Brij, a traveling Hong-Kong-suit salesman (the kind who will set up his tie and shirt displays on the ground floor of an embassy suites for a day, run advertisements in the local paper, then take orders for custom-tailored suits which are stitched in Hong-Kong, by Indians, and mailed back in a week), describes his foolproof method of gauging the local Indian population and finding an Indian restaurant in a strange city:

You look in white pages under B for ‘Bombay Palace’ or T for ‘Taj Mahal’ or I for ‘India House.’ These are equivalents of Asia Palace, Bamboo House, China Garden, or House of Hunan in the Chinese restaurant business. If there are no listings under those names, take my word there are probably no Indian restaurants in town. Failing this, you simply look up number of Patels in white pages and multiply by 60; that will tell you size of Indian community not counting wives, children and inlaws. Take my word: less than ten Patels means no Indian restaurant. If more than ten, you call, say you are from India, ask them where to go to eat.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“AIDS simply did not fit into this picture we had of our town. The TV stations and the Johnson City Press did a fine job parroting what the wire services carried about AIDS. But they never succeeded in treating the deaths of Rock Hudson or Liberace as being any more significant to our town than famine in the Sahel or plane crash in Thailand. You could shop in the mall, cut your hair in Parks & Belk, pick up milk at the Piggly Wiggly, bowl at Holiday Lanes, find bawdy entertainment at the Hourglass Lounge and never know that one of my patients was seated right next to you, or serving you, or brushing past you in the parking lot, a deadly virus in his or her body that was no threat to you, but might nevertheless cause you to stand up and scream if you knew how close it was.

My problem was the opposite: I saw AIDS everywhere in the fabric of the town; I wanted to pick up a megaphone as I stood in the checkout line and say ‘ATTENTION KMART SHOPPERS: JOHNSON CITY AS A PART OF AMERICA AND, YES, WE DO HAVE AIDS HERE.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“In the years that followed, I heard different but strangely similar versions of this story from families of gay men: There was always the God-given talent that accompanied their God-given sexuality, always the special creativity and humor. This fascinated me. Was it part of the subconscious effort to compensate for their difference? Was the charm and talent as biologically determined as the sexuality?

One gay man had told me how he had begun to feel tense and restless at his family house. His parents used to hear him laughing and carrying on on the phone with his friends; they knew he was the life of the party when he was with his friends. ‘How come you can't be like that with us?’ his parents would ask. ‘You don't understand,’ he would say. His natural state was to be happy and to laugh, but it went along with his being gay. He found it difficult to hide his gayness and maintain his outward fun persona. I'm still haunted by this remark. I have grown to realize through years of treating gay men how few of their families were able to see their sons’ best, most engaging selves.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“Just when many gay men had decided to give up the camouflage, to come out of the closet, AIDS had arrived on the scene, resurrecting the metaphors of shame and guilt, adding greater complexity to the process of coming out.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“As I drove away, I decided I would be wary of the Press. They were interested in the prurient side of AIDS; the scientific facts merely gave them an opening into it.

Why did this surprise me and disappoint me? I suppose I had expected the town paper to reflect the nicer qualities of its citizens.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

“A cigarette between one's fingers was as much a part of Tennessee life as squirrel hunting or country music.”
― Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story