Dr. Johnson: "A Sick Child" by Randall Jarell

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How do you tell a child that he is dying?This poem terrified me. It made me never want to have a child. What if this were to happen to my child? Literature cannot solve all of our problems, but it can be a salve to many of them. In talking to my old high school friend, Dr. Lamar Johnson, about this emotional issue, I came to appreciate the grandiosity of life and our role in society. Dr Johnson is a pediatrician who has to think about how to deliver terrible news to people. How do you cope? How do you convey this experience? For me, it was a cathartic moment. That's poetry.Dr. Johnson and I conversed with the verse. And we also talked more broadly about life, philosophy, how to tell the truth, race relations, culture and oh so much more.