Edith Ledbetter was one of the loneliest of all.

She just hid it better than the rest, behind her crosswords and her sharp tongue, the way she hid everything else.

I have thought a great deal, since, about what those first weeks taught me, because it was the most important education of my life and it happened entirely by accident.

I had gone to nursing school believing that the great enemy was illness — that if you could manage the body, control the pain, balance the medications, you had done the work.

Oakridge taught me that there is a second enemy, quieter and in some ways crueler, that no medication touches, and it is the simple absence of being seen.