Loss and grief: Personal stories of doctors and other healthcare professionals

ABSTRACT

This collection of personal narratives is just that stories intended to chronicle the journeys of a small number of health clinicians and other professionals who have been struck by personal illness and/or loss. What these stories do not assume is that there are answers to the universal experiences of loss and grief, courage, and survival implicit in the telling. While the past is gone, the meaning of it, however, is forever in flux, forever being worked and reworked in our conscious and unconscious minds. Each memory is a redoing of what it represents and brings forth within our sense of ourselves and in our relationships with one another. Grief challenges us physically, emotionally, and psychologically to recast the loss again and again. And, in recasting the past and the passage of time, refashioning memory to meet the needs of the moment in which the lost object and our response to it either helps us to move forward in our life or keeps us stuck, unable to engage with a future that requires acceptance of giving up the life lived before. The COVID pandemic further highlighted the internalization of expectations. Drilled into us in training is the "prime directive", the ethical responsibility of patient care and that one should deal with personal things on one's one time. The stories written in this collection were a draft perhaps unending versions telling of the experience. Some stories were written in one setting, others over many weeks or months as the writer lost and regained footing along the tale's trail. The shame, the sadness and weeping, the anger and guilt, and the shame of feeling relief of the pain and suffering for ourselves or those we love(d) and the "weakness" of not being able to manage it all echo through these stories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)