gap

 There's been a huge gap for 2020 - the pandemic.   I wrote a lot.  Most of it private.  Cycled through different stages of grief and mostly got stuck on "rage."

I liked very much the writing from the blog "The Dilettante's Dilemma" regarding dying. He writes about how people's bodies break down, but they fundamentally continue to be themselves:

“This person is the best answer I know to the question of what to do while you are dying. Living. That is the best thing to do while you are dying. You keep going to the places you can go; you keep hanging out with the people you used to hang out with.”

”There is always grieving when there is death, but grieving isn’t always the most prominent response. When a person has lived a long and successful life, it is perfectly appropriate to celebrate that life as a whole and at the same time to mourn the loss the the person.”

“I, myself, have lost a wife I adored and I now believe that you never really get done grieving. It just comes and goes and you call it for what it is when it comes and you say a gentle goodbye when it goes. That personal level is one where grief doesn’t “go away;” it just comes and goes.”

https://thedilettantesdilemma.com/2018/02/18/what-to-do-while-you-are-dying/ 

He also writes about how his retirement community has made peace with the loss of friends, and that it does not ripple the surface very much, with death "most often not a surprise. It is on some occasions a relief for everyone—the person, his family, and all of us who knew them.”

“There are people who have known me well and loved me dearly. I think I would hope for them the kind of grieving I have had for Marilyn. It comes and brings with it most often some really sweet memory, and then it goes and you smile with the memory. And then you go on living.

He also writes in the comments how he has made peace with death:

“I do feel detached from anxiety about it. But maybe just confident that I am in the place where I should be; in the right space, in the right relationships. If you do it right, it will look very different from the way I am trying to do it. It will look wonderful and VERY [you].”

I wonder if the grief from the pandemic and from being a physician will always be with me.  I wonder if maybe I take time to be sad and to grieve that maybe some of the rage will transmute to acceptance and peace.

I have been working in free clinic since finishing residency, but I just do not have the heart to do hospital medicine.  I don't know what to do with not just the grief of a physician and the grief of a witness, but also the special grief of a prophet, who knew that things did not have to be this way - who saw the tidal wave coming, and screamed and screamed, and nobody listened to how to avert the disaster.

And is still screaming, silently, wondering that maybe I should have and could have spoken louder, and perhaps things could have been different.

There is a reason that all the prophets seem crazy: to know and see the future, to know the path to change it, and to see the present rush headlong to destruction - how can one not grieve?