Letting go new yorker

The fires burn sometimes for hours. When the flames begin to sputter, the priest shovels the ashes, still smoldering, into the river. The melodrama of the scene is nearly perfectly offset by the glum, mechanical matter-of-factness of its participants.

Mounds of ash and marigold and wood chips are floating all around the boat. There is a man standing by one of the fires and facing the boat, with his arms still taut, as if holding the body — except he is holding air. The scene on the bank is mesmerizing. Then the boat rounds another bend, the haunted tableau vanishes, and we debark at another ghat. Decades later, having trained as an oncologist in Boston, I attend the funeral service of a woman who has died after a long battle with cancer.

I remember approaching the coffin, and then registering something odd: the woman has been coiffed and dressed up, and there is the faintest blush of lipstick — lipstick? Maybe the pandemic gives us the opportunity to change that. Questions are edited and condensed.

Fashion Should I Go Gray? Working from home has lessened my need to color my hair, so the grays are rooting up. Unfortunately, I have black hair, thus the contrast of colors is quite stark.

Do I continue to color or cover my hair, or do I let it become natural? The deal we each get on health care has a profound impact on our lives—on our savings, on our well-being, on our life expectancy. In the American health-care system, however, different people get astonishingly different deals. The prospects and costs for health care in America still vary wildly according to job, state, age, income, marital status, gender, and medical history.

We disagree profoundly about where we want to go. Kendall, for the most part, seems to have the upper hand at the moment. In the Season 2 finale, he dropped a bomb on Logan, revealing to the press that he had evidence — secured by his cousin Greg Nicholas Braun — that the Waystar higher-ups had covered up sex-crimes committed by a longtime employee of their Brightstar cruise line.

Relishing his moment in the spotlight, Ken has dozens of plans he wants to roll out immediately, to rebrand himself as the courageous whistle-blower putting an end to corporate sexism.

With an increasingly befuddled Greg by his side, Kendall makes a flurry of phone calls and takes meeting after meeting, speaking a mile a minute while firing off long sentences filled with nigh-incomprehensible biz-speak.