ABSTRACT
It was close to the end of my day on the inpatient AIDS unit at Roosevelt Hospital. I was a postdoctoral fellow in consultation liaison psychology. I felt I had just moved to a different country. Even though the hospital unit wasn't another geographic destination, it was a unique symbolic culture. This day, like most others, I had struggled to understand and to communicate in a version of my native language that contained inferences and references that were foreign to me. Death hovered in the air so palpably that it lingered on my clothes.
