“It is difficult for anyone to watch someone close suffer. The grief comes from not understanding the pain, and from knowing that suffering, even when it ends, will live on as memory. A child does not, and should not, understand her parents' memories, yet this incomprehension does not offer exemption. The child in every one of us carries the burden of memory's melodrama, not only our own, but those before our time.” SufferingMemoryBurden Book:Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life Source: Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
“Patient stated that she felt like a burden to loved ones" - much later, when I read the notes from the emergency room, I did not have any recollection of the conversation. 'A burden to loved ones': this language must have been provided to me. I would never use the phrase in my thinking or writing. But my resistance has little to do with avoiding a platitude. To say a burden is to grant oneself weight in other people's lives: to call them loved ones is to fake one's ability to love. One does not always want to subject oneself to self-interrogation imposed by a cliché.” BurdenLoved OnesClichePlatitude Book:Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life Source: Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
