Richard M. Berlin, MD

"We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves..."

"It is Christmas eve and our patient lies on the table in twilight sleep..."

"We wait, our bare feet dangling in the horse trough..."

"My work is loving the world..."

"Behind his couch, Freud senses summer’s return, draws a puff, flicks the ash, smiles as he studies his undying ember."

"Love is apart from all things. Desire and excitement are nothing beside it."

"For no particular reason I lift my dusty volume of Freud’s Standard Edition from a shelf..."

"Look out for me I’m a-coming too..."

"...her steady green eyes and naked display of farmgirl skill the chemistry that bonded us for life."

"I scribble as if my father is beside me years and years ago, scoring whole-notes, white holes through rims of night."

"In the silence I could feel the air slip in and out of his lungs and the moment when the motion reversed, like a goldfish making the turn at the glass end of its tank..."

"I was a Jewish boy from the Jersey burbs raised on corned beef and Milano cookies. She was a Mennonite farmgirl whose father shot deer for dinner."

"The sand stuck in an hourglass? Your brain is like stop it."

"Patients get better, treatments end..."

"You feel in your bones the gray gravity of late August clouds..."

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore..."

"Patients get better, treatments end, openings appear in my schedule and I leave them open..."

"Moments like that, you can love this country..."

"We ate, and talked, and went to bed, And slept. It was a miracle."

"If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness..."

"...Then twenty years swing by and I’m riffing chords on my father’s old D’Angelico, Grappelli’s photo clipped to the stand, an image captured the night he owned the ballroom stage, me on the dance floor..."

"I'm thinking about how good it is to have been sick, to have been turned inside out..."

"You think you’re too small to make a difference?"

"And when she allows our eyes to meet my joy from her gift pleases her more than I can understand on this birthday she loved to call my first day of medical school."

"...I would take you and take you and take you deep into any kind of nest you ever wanted."

"Lost in the anatomy of wonder, moments pass before I catch my mother’s smile while she pretends to dust her shelves..."

"In the ordinary weather of summer with storms rumbling from west to east like so many freight trains hauling their cargo of heat and rain..."

What is the first thing you share with your patient when you are about to prescribe a new medication?

"I love you as one loves the sickest patient: terminally, between the diagnosis and the death."