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223 Part Four: Personal In the Introduction to this book I cited the profound influence my wife had - and still has - on every aspect of my life. When we were very young she would ask, “What makes you tick?” In this final section, I offer some articles and addresses that discuss my family, love, education, and suggest the seeds that she nourished so carefully for so many years. The penultimate selection, a parable on weaving, may need some explanation; at the end of an intense period of public work, I became disillusioned with a politician I had worked with. Rather than lash out with unseemly details I wrote a piece that I think only my wife, the politician, and I understood. The concluding piece in this section brings us back to the beginning of this book; the first article was a report of a Pontifical Mission to war torn Lebanon undertaken at the request of Pope John Paul II. After his death, at the request of Vatican colleagues, I wrote a brief reflection on the unusual privileges and potential that can emerge in the good physician-patient relationship. Finally, I end this book, humbly and with eternal love, with a poem Kate wrote for my 65th birthday, one that offers her definition of what made - and makes - me tick. ...

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