"Do the math" I heard him give out with once from the cab of his backhoe for no apparent reason. He was backfilling a grave in Milford Memorial. "You gonna make babies, you've gotta make some room; it's Biblical."
Or once, leaning on a shovel, waiting for the priest to finish: "Copulation, population, inspiration, expiration. It's all arithmetic—addition, multiplication, subtraction and long division. That's all we're doing here, just the math. Bottom line, we're buried a thousand per acre, or burned into two quarts of ashes, give or take."
- Thomas Lynch,
Bodies in Motion and at Rest"Arithmetic"
House/Cameron
Mortality and metaphor: The whole is not always greater than the sum of its parts.
She still cries when they die, just a little, enough to blur her vision and make her turn away, scrub at her face with her sleeve, when someone catches her. When House catches her. They don't die much, House is good at his job, she has to give him that. But once in a while, like it's a requirement, a patient will die (whether they know why or not) and she will quietly, quietly break down in a dark corner somewhere.
( It's just life, she knows that. Life, and death, and all of this is as it should be. She should be moving on, not smearing her makeup and trying hard not to remember which suit the undertakers slid onto her husband's body for the viewing. )
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