Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
On a late autumn afternoon early in the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself masked and eye-shielded in a darkened, crowded room on our inpatient palliative care service. Karen, a woman in her 60s, was lying in bed trying to find a position to reduce the pressure on her back where recurrent lung cancer was attacking her chest wall. She managed her patient-controlled analgesia carefully; she wanted to be alert for this moment.