I stood in the shower, water dripping from me, at once both frigid and hot.  Already the memories of an hour's lifetime ago returned fresh in my mind, as if the once-potent mixture of scalding hot and bitingly cold water hadn't been there to wash them away.  I sat there again, in that oddly comfortable chair, looking into pained bright emeralds tearing up with years of sadness behind them.  Ten pairs of eyes looked on, each one a mirror of my own, and all of them on me, and on her, open and vulnerable in her suffering.

I stepped across the shower threshold, drying myself mechanically, my mind looked forever in that chair.  He was dying.  It was cancer she had said, and there was a finality in her voice that belied her fear.  Years of battling it, with remissions and flare ups, had taken their toll on both husband and wife, but this time was different.  They had done what they always did, underwent the proper treatments, only this time the disease did not relent.  So they switched to a newer, experimental method, and it showed some promise.  The damage had been done however; her husband was making preparations for the inevitable, and this told her louder than words that he had, on some level, given up.

"The mental side of it...that's so important...and I just....I just really feel," she paused a moment, searching, "...afraid.  Afraid that he's given up.  And I don't want him to give up, because if he gives up then he loses."

I could only nod in agreement.  Any words I could have said seemed like so much of a defilement of a moment far more sacred than any I had ever encountered.  Long moments of silence passed, broken occasionally by a few anguished sentences spoken in a voice on the edge of breaking.  I could only nod.  It felt like too little, yet at the same time, anything more seemed a corruption of the moment.

Ten pairs of eyes still looked on, watching, learning.  I envied them.  To be free of this feeling, like a neonate gifted with the guardianship of a person's soul, I felt at once honored and unworthy of such responsibility.  I thought often of acquiescing to experience, of pulling aside and letting my professor show us the way.  He sat there beside me, nodding and listening, adding the occasional criticism or encouragement to me, but whenever he did so I burned inside with shame.  How could I be so prideful to think I could handle something of this nature?

Learn by doing.  Stand up and get smacked down.  Keep fucking up until you get it right.  But to fuck up with something so fragile?  I'd sooner die.

My body flicked the blow dryer off, wrapped itself in a towel and made it's way to my room, burned feet scuffing across a cold wood floor.  My heart and my mind reached out to her again, from that oddly comfortable chair.

They felt for her, and I voiced those feelings.  They read the undercurrents of what she said, saw the implicit meaning, respected the sadness, shared in the pain.  They tore themselves to pieces, caught between the desire to help and the knowledge of the inevitable.  Frustration and anger rose within and fell again, drowned out by sorrow and helplessness.  The professor called an end to the session.  I railed against my own weakness, simultaneously consumed by the hatred of my pride and the pain and sadness she was feeling.  Guilt rose in me, for being so vile as to even worry about my own feelings when she was so clearly in deeper torment.

I entered my room, closed the door, sat in my chair, stared at the wall.  I was there in that oddly comfortable chair again, looking into pained bright emeralds tearing up with years of sadness behind them.  I wanted to say more, to stop it, to fix it, to end it.  Instead, I sat there in silence, listening, feeling.  And she smiled and told me that that was enough.