Some of my favorite professors in college always amazed me in their ability to say “I don’t know; let me get back to you on that one.” I had more than my fair share of professors who would give some long-winded response to a challenging question, and at the end you’d be no closer to the answer than you were at the beginning. I think doctors are even worse about this than professors are. They can’t not know the answers.

And I am sure a lot of patients expect their doctor to know all of the answers. They don’t want to see any sign of unsureness. They need confidence, even if it’s in the wrong thing. Yet in college, I learned that I got more from classes when the professors knew when they didn’t know something.

Well, I don’t know everything, either. My copy of the Internal Revenue Code is 9,500 pages, and that doesn’t count the regs and other authoritative literature. I do not know all of the answers. But I can get them. And I need to learn to forgive myself for those times when I have to look.

I was thinking about part of what Catherine‘s said on my last post: “I’m going to spend a little more time with my loved ones in honor of your Uncle Tom.”

I mentioned in the post that I was never incredibly close to my uncle. In fact, I’ve lost two uncles in the past year (dad’s brother and mom’s brother), and I wasn’t close to either of them. But in both cases, hearing their eulogies made me realize there were lots of reasons I should’ve been closer to each of them. My Uncle Tom, for instance, loved to do crosswords or play card games. Would it have been so hard for me to play a few games of cards with him?

Uncle Tom was also apparently quite the dictionary whiz. He knew just about any word you could throw at him. After the funeral Tuesday night, as we sat at his dining room table, my aunt asked if anyone could remember the word for pay given to a pastor for funeral services. We all sat stumped until I got on the internet and found the word – honorarium. My aunt remarked that Tom wouldn’t have needed the internet.

It is an outright shame that I only learned this stuff at the funeral. It seems like that’s when you really learn to appreciate people – after they’re gone.

But I’m not exactly sure what can be done about it. Should you ask everyone you meet “hey, what do you really like doing? No, I mean what do you really like doing”?” Or should we all talk about ourselves more often – be more aggressive about telling people what we enjoy in attempts to get them involved in our lives?