Dermatologist

The dermatologist He was a big expansive man who had a Homeric laughter when not shouting at nurses who loved him. He performed surgery on me and warned the problem would reappear in a few years; it did. At sixty-five, he was about to retire and travel the world before he got too old. He was a man in whose company people felt good a man with a good appetite for life, a lover of women and the best of wine. When I sat in the waiting room at the diabetes doctor, he came out looking pale and thunderstruck, he didn’t see anything, only saw a black wall of despair. The next thing I knew, he had taken his own life, which he loved so much; his colleagues were sad no one had seen this coming. His dreams of a sunny future were broken like a street lamp, in the dim autumn light. We know so little about other people that some regard as a setback, others see it as a catastrophe My cardiologist had tears in her eyes, why, why she murmured, he was so full of life.