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what one good doctor taught me about grief

6 Comments

We were brand-new to the clinic, looking for a new doctor after our beloved pediatrician had retired. Our three living children are healthy as galloping horses—a simple fact made astonishing after the deaths of their two sick sisters. But they still need well-checks and vaccines and strep tests and a place to call about rashes and fevers and flu.

So here I was, hugely pregnant, waddling in the door with a newly minted three year-old, ready for his yearly check-up.

He clung to my leg, worried about shots and whether I would stay with him the whole time. My concerns were less immediate, more long-term. The baby kicking within me would soon need a doctor, too (God, please, let it be so). A name to scribble for “pediatrician” on the hospital forms. Someone to see for the routine and not-so-routine visits that consume the first few months of babyhood.

So would I drop the grief bomb today?

Or would I wait till I had a wailing newborn safely in my arms?

How could I start to tell our story to a stranger who needed to know our past?

The receptionist greeted us with a smile and stack of forms. Pen in hand, I filled in the easy blanks. Then on the top of the second page, the question read stark and bold:

Has any member of the child’s immediate family died? (Parent, Sibling, Grandparent, etc.)

I caught my breath.

They asked this question first? Before the usual litany of ailments, conditions, diseases, and cancers that worm their way into every family tree?

I read it again. Then I wrote the only answer, pure and simple.

Yes – twin sisters born prematurely, died due to complications from twin-to-twin-transfusion syndrome.

It wasn’t a grief bomb. It was our life. It is who we are.

I finished every mundane checklist and carried the forms down the hall.

When the doctor swung wide the door, she greeted my son by name and with cheer. We both grinned.  She took the forms into her hands and began to read. I suddenly remembered what I’d written and started to stare very hard at the Elmo book in front of my son as if it were the year’s Pulitzer Prize winner.

“Oh,” she said as she scanned the page. “Oh—“

You learn this turn of tone as a parent of dead babies. You see instantly when people start to reshuffle their read on you, how the brain reels back and resets into a different mode. You become The Bereaved.

She looked me straight in the eyes. “I am so, so sorry,” she said.

“And I am so glad you gave them names. I’m so glad you shared them here. Because their brothers will always know they had sisters—they will always be part of your family.”

Startled, I nodded, willing the brimming water on my eyelids not to spill over.

“You never get over a loss like that,” she said, setting down the papers.

“It’s so huge. It’s devastating.”

And then, as if all the air had been sucked out of the room and I didn’t notice, it came rushing back in—a long breath of truth and empathy.

As if with a stamp of official medical coding, she had approved the last 16 months of my life.

(Because yes, did you know we still count months? That we cannot help but picture the ghosts of their selves grow one month older with each turn of the calendar? That the dates of their deaths have became the center of each moonly orbit, orienting us to grief by where we fall in the ellipse?)

You never get over a loss like that.

I can give you no prescription to pick up.

There is no handout to explain. No treatment plan.

Just plain truth. You. Never. Get Over. A Loss Like That.

In that heartbeat of a second, I knew I could trust this doctor with the lives of every one of my children. She already held them.

And in an era when health care horror stories overshadow every human side of medicine, all I could think was: you are a good doctor. I wish every grieving parent could hear you say what you just told me.

For when we need the official word, the stamp of approval, the solid defense against a society that shudders at death and shoves grief into small corners.

She did all the normal things. She checked my healthy son’s heart, lungs, eyes, ears. She knocked his knees with a rubber hammer to check his reflexes. She made him giggle that a grasshopper was jumping in his chest.

But before she did all that, she made our unnatural normal.

If only life could always be so easy. Any first encounter would ask us about our losses, the griefs and gaping holes in our lives and families. We could respond with honesty, without fear of judgment. Our heartache would be held in gentle hands, our vulnerability assured to be normal.

But that isn’t the way it goes. Truth be told, those encounters are as rare as the statistics that produce them. So we have to stop and notice when it happens.

Because one good doctor reminded me that once we name grief, we make it something we can carry.

And once it’s something we can carry, it’s something we can share.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Kathleen B Kelly says

    27 June 2017 at 6:28 am

    So glad this happened, Laura ! Empathy ~~ so welcome and uplifting in a medical setting! And, as ever, you tell the story wonderfully….

    Reply
  2. Lauren says

    27 June 2017 at 6:51 am

    Thank you for this. I had my physical yesterday and, because it’s part of my health history, I had to say out loud, again, that another uncle died by suicide. Two. Another. My doctor was kind and acknowledged the pain and devastation that must bring to a family. It was so helpful to have it acknowledged, not as a box to be checked off in a history of deaths and diseases, but as a real experience that happens and needs grieving and care. I didn’t realize it at the time, because I just wanted the words gone and the moment past. But you are right, it was a moment worth pausing over.

    Reply
  3. Elise says

    27 June 2017 at 1:21 pm

    Wow. So powerful. Thank you for sharing, as always.

    Reply
  4. jen says

    30 June 2017 at 5:51 am

    I’m very lucky to have a pediatrician like this for my kiddo.

    Reply
  5. GretchenJoanna says

    3 July 2017 at 8:03 pm

    I got both chills and tears reading this. I also am so sorry about your babies. Memory Eternal! That is what we say in the Orthodox Church, a prayer that God will remember them always. Of course He does, and of course we also won’t forget them, because we will ultimately be joined together again in that kairos that you speak of.

    Thank you very much for sharing this. And what a blessing that you are great with child once more.

    Reply
  6. Tara says

    5 July 2017 at 11:15 am

    Thank you for sharing this! It is beautiful that she acknowledged your daughters, we need more physicians like her. I have worked in healthcare for 12 years and they are greatly needed. I cried reading this. I was seeing my primary physician for a problem possibly caused by several pregnancies, he handled our three miscarriages with compassion. God Bless you!

    Reply

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About Laura

I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

thismessygrace
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
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Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
I am writing this to us next week. When our right I am writing this to us next week.

When our righteous anger will have quieted down. When the white-hot fury pulsing through our veins will have subsided. When the news cycle will have moved on.

Do not forget how we felt tonight.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

We cannot live like this. Literally—our children are dying. Our elders are being murdered. We have accepted violence as—a way of life? An unfortunate side effect of freedom? A helpless shrug?

No. I am not resigned.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

Remember how it felt today to hear the news and feel the world crack open—again, for we have heard it a hundred times now. Remember how you felt sick to your stomach. How the children around you glowed, alive and fragile, miraculous and vulnerable.

Remember how you wanted to do something, anything, how you wanted to act, how you wanted to stop and scream for it to end, how every cell in your body cried out that this was evil and unjust and horrific and cannot continue.

Press into that memory like a bruise.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

The only way anything changes is if we change. Change what we believe. Change who we support. Change how we vote. Change where we give. Change how we act. Change how we speak. Change how we pray.

There are no easy answers to terrible, complex problems—which is what gun violence in the US has become. But the lack of easy answers makes it all the more urgent and vital that we press into our righteous anger and say NO MORE.

Stay angry. Flip tables.

I am writing this for us, for tonight, for next week. And I never want to write it again.
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