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【社会人文】哀悼,不需要表达仅需要用心感受

Condolences, Felt but Not Expressed

Not long ago, soon after we put our pet dog to sleep, I received a handwritten note from our veterinarian expressing her condolences. The letter was not brief — she described my children’s fondness for little Rudy and how caring they were as his condition worsened. It was thoughtful and personalized, not something she had simply dashed off.

In contrast, during my 25 years of caring for humans I have written only a handful of similar notes to families after a loved one’s death.

This difference struck me again recently when the father of an acquaintance died in my hospital. He was a lovable guy, very much himself at all times, no matter the physical wreck he became as cancer progressively cornered him. He spoke with the same shrewd but amused tone even when in pain, insisting that we discuss only the important facts, not a bunch of medical baloney — facts about the Knicks or what was showing at the Guggenheim, whether the latest Tom Hanks movie was any good and did my wife like to cook?

Since his death, I have intended to write his family a note. But I haven’t, and I suspect I never will. My hesitancy, compared with the graciousness of my vet, has led me to wonder where I have gone wrong.

In my defense, surely there are basic differences between the vet’s situation and my own: responding to a dying, then dead, pet does seem less involved than the struggle against human mortality. And given the likelihood we would buy a new dog, it may just be good business to drop a few words. Or perhaps the explanation is nothing more complicated than the usual: doctors are blowhards, too self-important to bother to scribble the note, too lazy, too smug.

I doubt it is any of these reasons. Rather, I think doctors have a strange way of grieving their patients.

Probably no one cares about our feelings when a patient dies, and that’s as it should be. Our personal loss, after all, is trivial — most patients we know only as patients. But we do have feelings, a confusing mishmash that includes disappointment and embarrassment, but is mostly a sinking emptiness.

It’s like this: caring for very sick patients is exciting, probably because doctors, like everyone else, become swept away by human drama and possibilities. Managing a patient places us in the middle of hard decisions, bitter truths and sudden hallway conversations. We become futuristic acrobats of the high tech and the extreme, rather than yesterday’s stodgy pillars of the community, dispensing advice and lozenges, a silver-haired presence to steady any uncertainty.

But then the patient dies and bam! it’s over, just when we had so much to say, so many plans. We are left alone with our hectic thoughts ricocheting left and right and nowhere to point them.

Then, within hours after the death, a new patient is installed in the same room. You look in and see a stranger with darker hair and different clothes, reading a newspaper from somewhere else. And with the new patient comes a new set of visitors, in ones or twos or crowded at the door.

We just aren’t ready for the relationship to end. So we pour our dislocated excitement into a plan to write a note, a witty, heartfelt elegy for the family to treasure. We will sit down and calmly, incisively lay out our thoughts — what’s so hard about that?

Quite a bit, actually. To write something and stuff it into an envelope, seal it up and ship it out is altogether too bleak, too final.

In those odd, fading moments after a death, we find ourselves moved not so much by the patient’s sad fate as by the family. No matter how well, or how poorly, we have gotten along in the closing days, it is difficult to witness their dejection as they gather their belongings and make the bad-news phone calls. They had hoped for so much — a miracle, perhaps — and we delivered so little.

So we carry the unwritten note with us, a work forever in progress, to keep the family close in our thoughts, easy to impress and even dazzle — how nice of him to write! — as we take the time necessary to let things settle, adjust to the loss in our own small and selfish way.

We genuinely do plan to write, and soon too, but then, somewhere along the way, another patient’s calamity arises and we hurry off. Except this time, if things sour again, we will send a note. Definitely.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/health/12essa.html?ref=views 本人已认领该文编译,48小时后若未提交译文,请其他战友自由认领。 Condolences, Felt but Not Expressed
哀悼逝者—我虽未表达,但也感同身受

Not long ago, soon after we put our pet dog to sleep, I received a handwritten note from our veterinarian expressing her condolences. The letter was not brief — she described my children’s fondness for little Rudy and how caring they were as his condition worsened. It was thoughtful and personalized, not something she had simply dashed off.

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作者:admin@医学,生命科学    2010-10-10 05:11
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