The Elephant in the Room: Grief
Long before my husband and I could even imagine divorcing, before children, when we were still playing house, he was late returning home one night. It was the first of many, but this one stays with me to this day. He’d called a couple of times, saying “34 minutes,” “17 minutes” (he liked precise numbers, as I think he believed they somehow made his tardiness more bearable.) Soon it was well beyond 34 or 17 minutes. An hour passed. Then more. I turned the burner to low, muttering: I hope he was not in an accident. But if he is okay, I’ll kill him when he gets home. I vacillated between anticipating an unimaginable grief and fury.
When he finally did make it home, dinner now cold, he looked so sad, my anger immediately left me. It was no longer the fear of his death or the wish to cause it that lingered, but the death of someone I’d never met; his patient, a man not yet 30, who’d come in with a headache. Before my intern-husband was done with the intake, the patient collapsed right there in the exam room. After lengthy CPR, the man died of what was likely an aneurism. “I did CPR on him for so long. Way longer than you’re supposed to.” His face was drawn and tears shown in his tired green eyes as he spoke. “And then I had to call his wife.” I pictured this other man’s wife at home making dinner, waiting for her husband to return. Mine did come home. Hers never would.
I recently brought this story up to my ex, still one of my best friends. It had been some 30 years and it was still vivid in my memory. But much to my surprise, he did not remember the event. Maybe there have been just too many stories of death, too many late nights for untold reasons. It was, after all, only one of countless late nights and countless tragedies that my husband and I as his wife endured. But for me this particular story was significant for other reasons, as well. It was the beginning of my training to be the ever-stoic-wife-of-a-doctor. Doctors have one primary relationship: to their medical practice. If they are also married, they are juggling two relationships. For me, this story was only beginning of swallowing my anger, loneliness and yearning in place of the higher good — his job, where life and death are on the line every day. As the spouse of a doctor, you can’t compete with the demands of a war zone.
Back then, nearly 30 years ago, telling me the story acted as a bridge between us, between the battlefield of medicine and our home where I waited. In that moment, before medicine had worn out our marriage, we still shared some of heartbreaks that my husband experienced at work. His loss was in some way our loss. I absorbed his grief and that of the woman I’d never met. In some way, that sharing of sadness helped my husband feel understood and less alone in his work.
Grief is the recognition that something or someone is gone. It is the sense of what’s missing. So much goes missing with the practice of medicine, far beyond the hospital or clinic walls. Physicians carry that loss with them in an emotional bag, maybe slung over the shoulder or put away on a shelf. Even if its not death that you’re carrying, there’s a profound responsibility for other people’s health and well-being. The weight of it, if not metabolized somehow, lives in the body and can infect all the relationships around you. It shows up as burnout or substance abuse or another sort of elephant in the room. It could look like cynicism, impatience, depression, pain, apathy, anger, impatience or numbness — that inability to care or connect to others or to oneself.
Emotion is part of being alive and feeling one’s aliveness. Expressing emotions, especially to those you love, is the key to intimacy. Where the practice of medicine can make personal relationship threadbare, sharing stories of emotional impact is a powerful reinforcement for the fabric of intimacy.