Description
Loss and Grief: Personal Stories of Doctors and Other Healthcare Professionals is a unique collection of personal narratives that chronicle the journeys of doctors and other healthcare professionals who have been personally impacted by life-altering losses. Edited by internationally recognized practitioners of supportive care medicine and grief counseling, these are unflinching, first-person narratives of authors walking in their own shoes. The narratives reveal losses of cherished loved ones, integrity, dreams, naïve views of colleagues, and the lack of institutional support for these inevitable experiences. Although the narrators are well-established leaders in their fields, serious loss brought each back to the exposed core of their most basic selves. They learned that the professional veneer was too thin to be instructive or protective. Readers might resonate with their own painful experiences and memories, and others might wonder how they will imagine their own future when these inevitable aspects of being human-loss and grief-strike them, too.In Loss and Grief, it is our hope that such openly shared feelings of isolation and suffering will humanize the loss experience, ignite prospective discussions, and illuminate opportunities for education, research and interventions to prepare us for multiple loss experiences endemic to life.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsAbout the EditorsContributorsIntroductionMarshall Forstein 1. An Oncologist Reflects on Loss and the Culture of MedicineLidia Schapira 2. On "Doing" LossWendy S. Harpham 3. "Will You Take Me In?": A Story of Loss, Restoration, and SuccessDamon Madison 4. Losing ThemAmy Ship 5. When the Loss Is Not Just Personal, but Is of One's SelfJulia H. Rowland 6. SpeechlessMatthew Loscalzo 7. "Did Your Mother Ever Die?"Fredda Wasserman 8. Panel 19, Number 9, East: In Memoriam to Larry Insel, 01 May 1967Mitch Golant 9. Five DecadesSteven T. Rosen 10. Lost and FoundSusan D. Block 11. "In Sickness and in Health, 'Til Death Do Us Part"Marshall Forstein 12. With This RingCheryl Krauter 13. Good Times, BrotherJohn Halporn 14. For Better or for Worse: A Couple Reconfigures Life After LossJoan Heller Miller and Ken Miller 15. Watching My Wife MoveJoseph V. Simone and Patricia Ann Sheahan Simone 16. Life Is Loss (. . . and How I Tolerated It when I Became a House Officer): A Personal MemoirCy A. Stein 17. Mourning and RestorationCraig D. Blinderman Conclusion Loss: We Can Do BetterMatthew Loscalzo, Marshall Forstein, and Linda A. Klein Suggested Reading
