Noah Wyle

And she said, well, that wasn't real.

I said, well, this one wasn't either.

And she said, but it felt real.

And it brought all that up for me.

Isn't that funny?

And so here I am in my own kitchen having this lovely sort of cathartic and catalytic moment with my mother.

And I asked her, I said, the four-year-old, when was that?

She said, oh, I think your brother was probably about four at the time.

I think that's why it hit me.

And then I thought to myself, oh, so you came home and you made us dinner that night and you helped us with our homework?

Wow.

That's 35 years it's been in there.

Came out last Sunday.

That's as hard as it gets.

We do these debriefs to try to give a sense of closure, meaning to difficult cases so that they won't linger.

But trust me, the kids you'll lose will linger.

So what do you do?

I did my residency at Big Charity in New Orleans.

And day one, I got a kid, five-year-old boy, accidentally shot by his brother, playing with dad's gun, worried he was gonna get in trouble.

right up until he coated and died.