For the doctor
closing the office.

Dr. Whitfield has been a family doctor in this town for 41 years. He delivered some of you. He set the broken arm of the kid sitting in row four. He told the woman in the third row, in 1998, that she was going to be a mother — which I know because she told me on the drive over here. He took every call at every hour. He cried, once, in his car, after a patient he had seen for 30 years died. He didn't tell anyone except his wife, and she didn't tell anyone except me, the year after he retired. It was never the work that made him who he was. It was the way he showed up to it. Every patient. Every day. Same care. Today, the next patient gets a different doctor. That doctor will be fine. They will not be him.