Now Is the Time to Attend to the Relationships That Matter
Yes, we need to wash our hands. We also need to love out loud.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, it was easy to feel disconnected from the experience of serious illness, especially as a young or otherwise well person.
As a palliative care physician, my experience is quite the opposite. Every day I care for patients whose reality is life-limiting illness, and this spring I found myself at the bedside of patients dying of coronavirus. With Covid-19 cases in the U.S. surpassing the five million mark, this pandemic has upended our once protective narrative of separation. It has brought death into our homes and forced us all to acknowledge it directly.
Though my work as a physician prepares me more than most, it was not until my own sister’s life lay in transient shadows that I realized how impossible it is to be prepared for the unexpected loss of someone we love. Looking back, it was then that I started to learn that living with emotional intentionality may just be our only way to try.
Last year, my sister Morgan, at only 35 years old, suffered a near fatal heart attack caused by a spontaneous coronary artery dissection. One minute, my family waited for her at a chic bar in Detroit to celebrate our mom’s birthday — and the next I watched deadly tracings race across her heart monitor before she was rushed to the cardiac cath lab.
I have learned the true question inhabiting the underbelly of loss: Am I living with intentionality in my actions and in the love I show? If not, am I willing to face my own potential regret when tragedy inevitably arrives?
We did not see her again for eight terrifying hours and were told it was unlikely she would survive the night. My grief was incomprehensible. Morgan had been perfectly healthy, and worse, we had argued senselessly only hours before. Now, I did not know if I would ever speak to her again.
I slept on a vinyl couch next to her hospital bed in the cardiac ICU for weeks, waking to every beep, sinking in the landscape of uncertainty. I pleaded why her, why…
