A memoir about identity, family, medicine, and finding meaning after the white coat comes off.
An excerpt
For more than twenty years, I lectured my patients about meaning.
Viktor Frankl. Man's Search for Meaning. I talked about it over and over again because I believed it. Human beings need meaning. We need some reason to get out of bed in the morning, some answer—however imperfect—to the question of why we're still here.
It was good advice.
It is considerably easier to give good advice than to need it yourself.
For most of my adult life, I didn't have to think very hard about who I was. I was Dr. Cobb.
I had other identities, of course. I was a husband. A father. A Jew. A Buddhist. Before all of that, I had been a punk rocker, a high-school dropout, a Navy corpsman and a CPA, which is a ridiculous enough sequence that I probably wouldn't believe it if somebody else told it to me.