" When Alma first started at the hospital, some of the nurses taught her to pray for the children according to severity. A level one meant pray that the child would be well; level two meant pray for decreased pain. Alma was slow to understand level three--praying that the children would die, that mercy and grace would shorten their suffering--but she had come around to it a few months into her job, when the boy with the shattered face was wheeled in. His mother's eyes convinced Alma that sometimes you suffered more the longer you lived. "

― Nafissa Thompson-Spires , Heads of the Colored People