Vox Meditantis

Catherine examines the principles that shape her psychiatric practice and personal life: the necessity of truly witnessing others, the discipline of sitting with discomfort, balancing inherited legacies with self-authorship, maintaining clear-eyed compassion, and tending one’s own internal landscape with care.

Eighteen years after her mother’s death, psychiatrist Catherine Bennett finally confronts the guest room shrine she’s carefully avoided sorting – a poignant repository of Elizabeth’s adventurous spirit and a mirror reflecting Catherine’s own choices between boldness and steadiness, passion and pragmatism.

In a Delaware hospital room during spring 1988, Catherine Bennett kept vigil beside her father’s bed following his stroke. That quiet night, watching her parents’ vulnerability and her siblings’ familiar patterns, she discovered adulthood arrived not dramatically, but through the simple choice to hold space for others’ burdens.