The sick or hurt who sink slowly into the rough bedsheets or stumble through the door are afflicted with conditions either too late or too sudden to treat. The diabetic amputees are wheeled scowling from their beds to the row of dialysis machines as their extremities and organs begin to fail. The victims of gunshot, frostbite, or beatings are patched with even temper and professional attention instead of caring and concern. Their condition is, to the doctors, a challenge of form; satisfaction in the performance beats out the pleasure of helping. The tricky run of stitches becomes the object itself instead of the life that pulses underneath.

There are no lingering sicknesses in the hospital or neighborhood. No exotic diseases that draw specialists from conferences or shake families from their vacations to stand in the crowded rooms and dirty hallways. The doctors see no diseases that kill the patients but leave them their minds and tongues so they can give the family a blessing before they die, diseases that enable them to heal a quarrel or come clean with the whereabouts of an illegitimate child, or even to die peacefully, silently with dignity.

Instead, people die exhausted. Everyone is tired—the patient, the tattered families, and the doctors who have long ago given up healing and instead focus on containment. No one dies whole. They move on missing limbs, or blood, or bone, or memory. They are hit by cars, sugar diabetes, fractures, evisceration and strokes. Since they die this way, die because they lack a part of themselves, they have nothing to bequeath to the living. No fortune or advice. No tender words or harsh regrets. Instead, the sick take from the living the remainder of their sympathy, energy and tenderness, all of which they use to make themselves whole as the sheets they incarnadine while they creep like thieves from the living.

It hasn’t always been like this, surely. Betty ties on the apron and takes the bucket of prepared cookie dough from the freezer. She has only to dollop it on the baking paper with a number-two ice cream scoop and stick it in the oven.