Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: grief

  • Thinking of my dying grandmother at the Natural History Museum

    Roxana Cazan Altoona, Pennsylvania, United States   Bosnian landscape. Photo by Melisa Javier-Wetklow.   At the Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City, I am promised “the assemblage of nature’s ultimate machine,” its precise lurking, one foot crossing the Silurian, its simian lurch trapped behind shatterproof glass. I zigzag through the dinosaur world, the tender bend…

  • Five Untitled Poems

    Simon Perchik East Hampton, New York, United States   Mark Rothko, No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953, 115 cm × 92 cm (45 in × 36 in). Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles   * Slowly the glass, half filled, half melting down for a slipper not yet hardened into light   is flickering the…

  • Morning note

    Jeanne Bryner Warren, Ohio, United States Poet’s statement: “Morning note” was a response to finding my husband’s note. Couples who have come through this type of grief know its depth. There are many gravesites on our journey. Names we dare not speak burn themselves inside our hearts.   Morning note In a few moments I’ll…

  • Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and the five stages of grief

    Katharine LawrenceFlorida, United States Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. “Vermiform appendix! Kidney!” he said to himself. “It’s not a question of appendix or kidney, but of life and . . . death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and I cannot stop it.…

  • Heartache and complicated grief

    Laurie Elise Gordon New York, New York, United States Because He Married A Succubus. Sveta Dorosheva, 2014. www.faithistorment.com Private Collection.   “To whom shall I tell this heartache?” – Old Russian song   Medicine is haunted by grief. In tense silences we may sense the specter. Grieving is a normal developmental process, but in some…

  • Anticipatory grieving

    Constance E. Putnam Concord, Massachusetts, United States   Anne Todd Hochberg Chromogenic print 6”x 9” When my father was making his slow decline into the grip of Parkinson’s disease, I found it easy (embarrassingly so, in retrospect) to criticize my mother for what I confidently labeled her unnecessarily grim view of the situation. She always…

  • When did you last let your heart decide?

    Sukanya SamChennai, India This woman in labor is not my patient. But the nurses worriedly tell me that the baby’s heartbeat could not be localized. Both handheld Doppler machines had broken down in the labor room unit of our small tertiary hospital. I was the resident on duty. I use the Pinard’s stethoscope, my face…

  • Lost Babies: How a photosculpture is changing the etiquette of consolation

    Nancy GershmanChicago, Illinois, United States The mother who loses her full-term baby goes home with the five stages of grief (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross), funeral home pamphlets, and a support group calendar. But the well-meaning friends and family who await her return have little if no experience with consolation. They will prattle on about how So and…

  • Crossing boundaries: visual representations of death and dying

    Mary T. ShannonPortland, Oregon, United States Introduction How do we as clinicians, caregivers, and fellow human beings talk about death and dying in our culture, or perhaps more precisely, how do we not talk about it? Many avoid the topic out of fear, denial, or discomfort, creating silent narratives that torment, isolate, and separate at…