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somebody who was going to die, just as surely as the basketball season would end in a few weeks. It was inevitable. It didn’t seem like there was anything I could say.
    Meanwhile, he seemed so pleased to talk to me. I wondered how much he knew. Why was he so calm? Didn’t he know his situation? He must know. He must be aware that he might not walk out of this hospital again. Why was he so calm?
    Just talking away, sports. Baseball season. Spring training.
    Eventually I couldn’t stand it. I had to leave. I had to get out of that room. I said, “Well, I’m sure you’ll be up and around in no time.”
    He looked disappointed.
    “What I mean is,” I said, “you’re definitely on the mend, you’ll probably be out of here in a week or so.”
    He looked
very
disappointed. I was saying the wrong things. But what should I be saying? I had no idea.
    “So cheer up, I’m sure they’ll be arranging for you to leave any day now. I’ve got to go now. Rounds, you know.”
    He looked at me with open contempt. “Sure. Fine.”
    I fled, closing the door behind me, blocking out the view of this man my own age who was close to death.
    I went back to the resident. “What’re you supposed to say to someone like that?”
    “That’s a tough one,” the resident said.
    “Does he know?”
    “Yeah, sure.”
    “So what do you say?”
    “I never know what to say myself. It’s a bitch, isn’t it?”
    In retrospect, it seems inconceivable to me that in four years of medical education, nobody ever talked to us, formally or informally, about dying patients. Arguably the most important item on any medical curriculum, death was never even mentioned at the Harvard Medical School. There was no consideration given to how we might feel around a dying person—the panic, the fear, the sense of our own failure, the uncomfortable reminder of the limits of our art. There was no consideration of what a dying patient went through, what such a patient might need or want. None of this was ever discussed. We were left to learn about death on our own.
    When I think back, I imagine the horrible isolation that young man must have felt, sitting day after day in a room that nobody wanted to enter. Finally some poor medical student comes in, and this young man has a brief chance to talk to another human being, and he’s delighted. He would like to talk about what is really going on in his life. He’s worried about what will happen to him. He wants to talk—because, unlike me, he can’t avoid the realities. I can run from the room, but he can’t. He is stuck with the fact of his impending death.
    But instead of talking about it, instead of having the strength to stay with him, I merely mumbled platitudes and fled. It was no wonder he finally regarded me with contempt. I wasn’t much of a doctor: I was far more worried about myself than about him, but he was the one who was dying.
    I was still pretending that I was somehow different—that he wasn’t like me—that it would never happen to me.

The Gourd Ward
 
    Four o’clock in the morning, and I am stumbling around in the closet of my apartment in the darkness, trying to find everything I am supposed to bring, my stethoscope and my doctor’s bag and my notebook and everything else, because finally the day has come when I am no longer working part-time in the hospitals, pretending to be a doctor. My clinical rotations begin today. From now on I will work every day and every other night in the hospital. I am tremendously excited and nervous and I keep dropping things in my closet. At last I have everything but I can’t find my car keys. It is 5:00 a.m. I am going to be late for my first clinical rotation—neurology at the Boston City Hospital.
    The old brick buildings of the Boston City looked more like a prison than anything else. I found the parking lot, and made my way through the basement corridors to the correct building.
    I said “Good morning” to the elevator operator.
    “Hiya,