Grief and Joy

It was around 2000. I’d been thinking about doctors’ experience of their patients’ deaths. Did it affect their ability to carry on? The choices they offered their patients, balancing risk against the chance of the patient’s recovery? And what about their lives outside the clinic? Had anyone done a study on this topic? 

I came across a review of an edited volume called Empathy and the Practice of Medicine: Beyond Pills and the Scalpel. The lead editor was Howard Spiro, a renowned gastroenterologist at Yale. I e-mailed him with the broad strokes of my idea, and he suggested we meet. 

I knocked on the door of his condominium on Temple Street. Dr. Spiro, mid-60s I guessed, modest height, plump, goatee, was welcoming, casual. We sat in his living room and made small talk. He went upstairs to get a book he had mentioned. Coming back down, he said it was good to have stairs, good for the heart. 

Before long he was reminiscing. He told me about the time when, as an undergrad at Harvard, his classmate, Norman Mailer, taught him how to take a condom filled with water and time the drop from a third floor dorm room window to a student’s approach to the front door below so that the condom landed splat! on the crown of his head. 

We got around to my idea, which he thought was a good one. At some point I thought I should tell him about my experience with Jesse. Not that being the father of a child who had died in a hospital disqualified me for taking on the topic I was thinking about, just that . . .  

Here’s how it works. When I was running a homeless outreach team in New Haven and studying the encounters of people who were homeless with outreach workers, I would sometimes go out on my own, stand in line at a soup kitchen, say, to get a feel for that experience. If I ended up talking to the person in front of me and the conversation began to move beyond ‘How’s the food here?’ I would tell her who I was and what I was doing. Otherwise, I knew something she didn’t, and knowing it might affect what she felt comfortable talking about with me. And that’s a power  imbalance that can be corrected, at least in that area. 

This is true even when you’re talking with a doctor who might help you with a study that involves talking to other doctors. I told Dr. Spiro about Jesse. There was a long pause. 

“You never get over something like that,” he said. 

I felt a rush of elation that I can compare only to seeing and holding each of my newborn children for the first time. Someone had spoken the truth to me, and it was transporting. I was free, still grieving, but alive again, able to take in a full breath and let it out all the way. 

I ended up not conducting the study. It would cut too much into my time writing Jesse’s story, I decided. And just to note, I’m not claiming ‘You never get over something like that’ would necessarily be the right thing to say to any grieving parent. I’m  just saying it was the right thing for me. 

Rest in peace, Dr. Spiro.