i went for coffee with a doctor friend, i didn't want to see anyone else - minyin is not here - though she calls me twice a day - and he was the only one else i really had trusted - funny how nearly three quarters of all the doctors in this country came from our school - su-lin was saying she can't walk into sgh without seeing someone you used to see in the school canteen or the lecture theatre - but it was him i needed - for i needed - in addition to love and friendship - which so many others were so ready to give me - the knowledgable objectivity and sympathetic patience and the clear-minded concern that comes of long friendship and professional training. but it didn't come tonight. i was angered by our short encounter - even as i am sorry for feeling savage - i saw him so little - three or four times a year - and all our meetings were always good, comforting, full of affection and ease and laughter - but we angered each other - were on the verge of quarrelling without actually doing so - though we each knew what the unsaid was - he had made time for me despite my uncertain schedule, and had come out to meet me at short notice - had afterall, cared for me very much - and yet he was strangely distant that night, and i was self-absorbed and distracted - and i couldn't help being angered - that happens to many of our doctor friends, doesn't it? becoming so accustomed to death and dying that they are not broken up by it anymore - and that's part of the job - being detached - and he was angered by my anger towards him - because they do get attached to patients too - he is right - for him especially - having worked in paediatric surgery for so long - and seeing children die is worse - much worse - the dying children give him things - stickers, drawings - and i know it hurts him - i did not mean to call him cold-hearted - he was angered by it - it would have been better if we had quarrelled - but we both inferred the unspoken - we were almost - though never outright - snappish. and it is true we need learn that detachment - we need learn from the doctors - but then - they need learn something from us too - you don't attend - you aren't allowed to attend your own family - precisely - so that the inurement, or the acceptance, of the process of death - the superiority in a more enlightened outlook - is unrelated to that of the ordinary man - you learn what it means for humanity to die, but for your own family to die - doesn't the guideline that prevents doctors from attending their own family presuppose this very separation - that the death of a family member is not experienced in the same way as the death of a patient - and that they, with their vast experience of death, experiences a different kind of loss. and should i blame him that he does not live away from home three quarters of a year, that he has other siblings at home, that he is a medical professional, that he has not been lonely, that he has not lost in recent years close friends and relations, that he isn't landrooted?