Sad is a weather that passes.

Loneliness, the kind I met at Oakridge, was a climate — a permanent condition that people lived inside of for years, that shaped their faces and slowed their steps and dimmed their eyes, as real and as physical as any diagnosis on their charts.

And the terrible thing, the thing that made me want to weep in the supply closet more than once, was how cheaply it could have been treated.

Not with medicine.