I did not understand, at first, why the sight of it undid me so completely, and then I did.

It was an act of pure attention.

There was no efficiency in it, no outcome a chart would ever record.

Shaving the last of a dying woman’s hair so that she would not have to grieve it by the handful each morning was not medicine and it was not a task; it was simply one person refusing to let another be humiliated by her own body, and it was the kind of care that cannot be delegated or purchased, only given, by someone willing to be present for the ugly, unglamorous particulars of another person’s decline.

“I’m almost finished,” Juliet whispered.