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Excerpt from the Prologue of The Measure of Our Days

Tell me, O Lord, what my term is,
what is the measure of my days...
Man walks about as a mere shadow;
mere futility is his hustle and bustle...
What, then, can I count on, O Lord?
Psalm 39: A Psalm of David

      In the spring of 1974, I was awakened by a phone call in the middle of the night from my mother. My father, the person I loved and admired most in the world, the person who had centered and guided my life, had had a massive heart attack. He was in a small community hospital in Queens. I was living in Manhattan, a second-year student at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, still learning medicine from books and in laboratories. I rushed from my dormitory, arriving in time to see my father in the final throes of cardiac shock. He was attended to by a general practitioner unknown to my family, who offered no special medical expertise or emotional comfort. My father died before my eyes. He died before his time, and without time--time for him, his family, and his friends to prepare for his passing.

      This experience explains in part my powerful commitment to care for patients and their loved ones in a way that my father and my family were not cared for--with genuine compassion and scientific excellence. And it provides a very personal point of reference for why I find the time before death so precious, so worth fighting for.

      We feel both a deep attraction and a powerful resistence to thinking about the biological and emotional circumstances surrounding death. Until recently, it was nearly taboo to discuss the subject of death frankly in our society. Now issues of illness and mortality are being debated even in out courts and legislatures. When I listen to such discussions, I realize how distant law and precept are from the turmoil and struggle that occur at each patient's bedside. In this book I seek, above all, to capture and illuminate that conplexity, not by academic analysis, but by the way of true stories, told as they unfolded before my eyes, as medical mysteries and human dramas. Some of the stories I tell here come to resolution and provide answers; others raise questions that still await a response.