You tell so many wonderful stories in all your writing you chose to write about your grandmother your Baba in how we die you wrote about her death and

You know so many of the stories you tell her about

Moments in surgery or in hospitals and individual lives in the balance and they're all so unique

Do you know what I learned from writing that book if I learn nothing else the more

Personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you were willing to be about the details of your own life the more

Universal you are when you recognize that pain and

Response to pain is a universal thing it helps explain so many things about others just as it explains so much about yourself

It teaches you forbearance it teaches you a

A moderation in your responses to other people's behavior teaches you a sort of understanding

It essentially tells you what everybody needs you know what everybody needs you want to put it in a single word

Everybody needs to be understood

And out of that comes every form of love

Dr.

Sohn Newland died this week at the age of 83

He became well-known through his first book how we die which won the National Book Award in

1994

But pondering death was for him a way of wondering at life and he reflected on the meaning of life by way of

Scrupulous and elegant detail about human physiology. I'm Christopher Tippet and this is on being

Sure when Newland was a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University and a practicing surgeon for 30 years

After the success of his book about death Dr.

Newland turned his attention to the infinite variety of processes that maintain human life moment-to-moment

I spoke with him after a

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