How (Not) To Deal With Someone Else’s Grief

I do not remember being hit in the head. But I’m told it was pretty bad.

I started to grasp how bad it was when I woke up in the hospital with my wife standing over me, two days later, and she said “You just had two brain surgeries.”

As a philosophy professor, this was certainly a cause of grief and worry. I wondered if my career was over, if I’d ever be able to work again.

But something bothered me even more than that: for several days my family had been wondering if I was going to survive the accident…