1 Sarah Brand McCarthy is a clinical psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, and a Public Voices Fellow at AcademyHealth in partnership with The OpEdProject. Contact author: mccarthy.sarah@mayo.edu. The author is grateful to the staff in the PICU at Boston Children's Hospital and their policies that made the love her family experienced possible. This essay is dedicated to nurses everywhere who show up every day and who make the unbearable bearable. Illustration by Regan Donovan.