Grief and Loss — What Physicians Carry Home

Physicians witness death with a frequency that few professions can match. They deliver terminal diagnoses. They hold hands during final breaths. They call families with news that shatters worlds. And then they walk out of the hospital and are expected to function as if nothing happened.

Medical training provides almost no preparation for the emotional weight of these experiences. There is no lecture on how to grieve a patient you loved. No rotation on how to process the death of a child you delivered years earlier. No textbook chapter on what to do when you sit in your car after a shift and cannot remember how to drive home.

The stories in this collection are about physicians confronting loss — of patients, of colleagues, of the version of themselves that existed before they understood how fragile life really is. They are stories about the grief that medicine doesn't acknowledge and the healing that begins when someone finally says: you are not alone in this.