After work today spent some time w a coworker who just enrolled her husband in hospice... It's taken him 3 years to die... I can't even imagine all she must be feeling as the end draws near.

I remember when Loopy was in the hospital, I used to be struck by how all the faces around me were stripped of social graces and laid bare to the most basic humanity... We all wore the same expression of stunned vulnerability. I remember every time I got into the elevator, I stared dumbly at the floor listings, alphabetical... and read the series, "bone...breast...burn..." thinking of human fragility and all the ways we can be hurt.

You never know where pain will come from, or how you'll survive. But it always does, and you always do.