Life and Loss

Life and Loss December 20 2009


Grief:

A door,

A lesson.

A gift,

An opportunity.



We grieve the loss of what we used to have

That seemed good and right and ours.

We grieve on stepping through each door,

Leaving things that were to find what is to be.

Saying goodbye, we mourn.

And yet, the lesson is to greet the now,

To see the gift,

To grasp the chance -- step into our nextness,

Find its joy.


Reflection:

As you aged, you lived in ever greater pain. ,First, your spine, weakened by your uneven body, caved in on itself. Driven by unyielding pain, you had to leave your prized position as an attending physician and medical school professor at a prestigious hospital. Your personal relationship of twenty years had already ended, plunging you into grief. Then your professional life collapsed when your back “went bad.” You were wearing a steel corset to brace your back and diminish the pain. You had to lie down and rest, for several hours a day. You felt alone, forsaken, fearful. You were afraid to walk, afraid to fall. You felt old and weak, walking with a cane. You were in your mid fifties.

Just months before, you had been in charge, powerful, living the life of which you had dreamed and for which you had worked tirelessly. You were asked to appear on television as a medical expert. You were accepted as a fellow of the prestigious American College of Physicians. You were sought out as a teacher and speaker. Daily, you were consulted by colleagues from every part of the hospital, who asked you to figure out ways to prolong the lives of dying patients. You wrote articles and scholarly chapters. You traveled to conferences. You confronted the head of your hospital with proof that female physicians were every bit as productive as males, but averaged salaries that were 25% lower. You persuaded him, with the strength of your evidence and conviction, to begin the process of paying women equally.

When you had to leave your position because of disability, you were stunned. Contemplating your new situation, you wrote, in despair: “My hospital, my patients, my life – all gone.”

Yet, there was a next life, during which you redefined yourself and experienced much satisfaction. Your back, which remained sometimes excruciatingly painful, did improve, so that you didn’t have to keep wearing the torturous brace and you were able again to walk and enjoy the city you loved. You created a new career for yourself, as the psychotherapist you had always wanted to be. You were proud to help patients very ill with HIV or cancer.

You found, purchased, and designed your beloved loft on 13th Street. The loft defined you, as the hospital had previously done. You were a superb hostess and loved to entertain. The apartment was stunningly beautiful, with its classical modern furniture, spare décor, and comfortable living room with its tiny fireplace with the half-round mantel – a real achievement of your fascination and talent with architecture and the visual esthetics of space.

You became involved as one of the early founders of the New York Gay and Lesbian Community Center, serving on the Board, raising funds within the community, and aiding in the fundraising by opening your loft again and again to host stunningly elegant parties for major donors from the broader community. This was in the 1980s, a response to the need for the gay community to support its members suffering with AIDS. The Center became your home and a major focus of your life. You loved it passionately,,both as a cause and a community. You likewise became one of the early, founding members of SAGE in New York – “Senior Action in a Gay Environment.”

You had had relationships with other women, consistently since high school, and had maintained a twenty year relationship with one important partner, a fellow doctor. You had suffered the effects of anti-gay prejudice, having been forced to resign from your first medical school when it became known that you were gay. That time, too, you had risen from the ashes to fulfill your dream of becoming a doctor. You applied to the medical school at the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, where many fellow Americans also were medical students. There, you completed your medical training with high honors, in a foreign language, French. You then returned to the US, and went on with internship and residency at important hospitals, before being invited to stay on as an attending because of your brilliance.

After that ejection from school for being gay, you, along with other gay people during that period, lived a double life, in secrecy. You told no one at work or in your family about your sexual orientation. But, after you were no longer on staff at the hospital, and had become deeply involved in creating a refuge for suffering members of the gay and lesbian communities, you felt compelled to make it clearat least to friends that you were, in fact, gay. One good friend who had studied as your intern told me about receiving a long, eloquent letter from you in the late 1980s, saying that you felt obliged to tell everyone that you were a lesbian. This friend said “I’d stayed often at the apartment of Ellen and her partner. I knew! I couldn’t figure out why she was telling me this.” She went on to describe how you had the apartment set up with two bedrooms, telling everyone who came that one was yours and the other your partner’s, although one of these rooms – the one she’d stayed in -- actually served only as a guest room.

Over time, your despair at losing your relationship, your health and your profession, , all within a short period, gave way to the satisfaction of a full new life, although you remained desperately lonely, seeking a partner for life.

Looking back on my own life, I’ve also seen that the periods of despair and grief at losing positions or people that defined me have ultimately given way to new roles and relationships. Loss each time has been crushingly painful, but after an agonizingly slow period of recovery, has then become door, gift, and opportunity.

The transitional periods of seeking and creating the next situation have been deeply painful. I was sent away from the convent; years later, laid off permanently from the job for which I’d trained and prepared and which I loved, teaching French; I mourned the loss of a long marriage that wasn’t working,; lost a lifelong deep friendship after nursing my friend during his final month;, and, lost you to cancer. I’m now in one of those periods of transition when a new chapter is taking shape but is not yet apparent.

The door opens both ways. We look back and weep for what was. We look forward and hope for a next period of happiness. In between, we stand on the threshold, feeling lost, trying to be mindful of the present and grateful for the blessings of each moment as we live it.


Ravaged December 10 2009

86th St. I’m walking toward the Subway,

Hunched forward in the wind, hooded and scarfed.

I see, coming toward me, a tall stooped figure with fine white hair.

She pushes a walker,

Trudging slowly down the street into the knife-cold gusts.

Her knees fold inward, feet splayed wide, with

Thickened ankles, flat laced-up shoes, white cotton socks.

As I get close to passing her, I look up and

See the gorgeous, sable-colored, ankle-length mink coat,

The pale, patrician face –

A ravaged beauty, tragic, pinched, and sad.

I wonder what’s her story –

Why, instead of stepping elegantly from a limousine,

She limps painfully along, block after block,

In her lumpish laced-up brogues and ankle socks.

What ugly tragedy has led from glamour, power, money

To shuffling slowly, all alone,

Down this blustery winter street?