University of Maryland School of Medicine - Terrae Mariae Medicus (Baltimore, MD)

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months, and nine days.” She counts off her marriage like rosary beads. Her eyes fill with tears. ‘‘Gosh, I miss him,” she says. February 1986: Psychiatry. Job Randall is a 26 year-old graduate student with a bachelor’s degree from Yale. His degree was delayed for two years because he could not finish one last assignment. He has not completed any of his graduate courses. He complains of ‘‘passive suicidal ideation” and demands electroconvulsive therapy. The team argues over a diagnosis but agrees that this unusually resistant young man is unlikely ever to realize his potential. May 1986: Medicine. Austin Drover is a 19 year-old bisexual man who contracted AIDS on the Block. As a new member of his treatment team, I gown and glove to introduce myself and start his IV — he will receive Amphotericin B for his cryptococcal meningitis. He tells me about himself, about his unwillingness to die: he has a girlfriend and wants to marry her. Soon he is sobbing. I put an arm around his shoulder and he buries his wet face in my yellow gown. October 1986: Subinternship, after a month of coast-to-coast travel to residency interviews. I come home late and find a message on my answering machine: the training director at my first-choice institution is offering me a position. March 1987: Austin Drover somehow accepted his death, asked for an end to medical intervention, and died of meningitis. Job Randall has dropped out of graduate school and is working as a waiter. Avery never got his transplant. My mother manages at home, alone, in her wheelchair. The bones in the gray footlockers have taught gross anatomy to three more classes of medical students. Yet scarcely have the leaves of summer fallen from the trees; scarcely have the rains of spring carried off the snows. 6

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