Blog Archive

Today, I was sitting with a group of first year medical students, and we were talking about loss.  Specifically, how to be with dying patients and their families.  We were discussing the situation of one man’s catastrophic grief:  the death of his entire family in a car accident.  What could we, as physicians, do in such moments, if anything? One student raised his hand and said that he felt uncomfortable even thinking about it.  That to try and say or do anything would feel

We sit together like this every week, him and I, and talk about it all. It has been almost eight years now since life fell apart for him, a slow motion and steady devastation. Hour by hour, we seek to understand, together, always together, the needle that went in his arm, the fall from grace, the trust that cracked wide open like lightening through a tree, and never quite came back. Who knows if we ever are really whole again? Or if we ever really were whole t