And I had made it home in time.

Whatever else I failed to do that terrible week, I had done that, and it is the thing I am most grateful for in my life.

There is a thing dying people do, that I had read about in my training and had now watched with my own eyes, which is that they wait.

The body, past all medical reason, will sometimes hold on for a person, or for a word, or for a permission to go — will keep a failing heart beating for one more day, one more hour, until the thing it is waiting for arrives.

Raymond had been left in conditions that should have taken him days earlier than they did.

I know the medicine; I know what dehydration and cold and unmanaged pain do to a body already ravaged by that particular cancer.