Say the Important Things: The Work of a Letter Midwife | Bryant Lin, MD and Frish Brandt

Many of us find ourselves awash in a deluge of instant communication. Text messages, emails, and direct messages come and go at a dizzying pace. Against this backdrop of overstuffed inboxes and lengthy text threads, we instinctively sense that letters – the kind you write or type and perhaps stuff in an envelope – are something different. Something weightier. For the terminally ill, writing a letter not only stands apart from other forms of communication — it stands apart from time. The proce...