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Vol. 45 No. 50
March 7, 2007 |
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Medical professionals urged to speak to,
learn from dead patients
(CNS) |
Chicago (CNS) — Those who practice “the finite and
fallible craft” of medicine need to forgive themselves and
learn to listen to their patients who have died, a
Franciscan brother and physician told a group of Catholic
ethicists March 1.
Brother Daniel Sulmasy, director of the Bioethics Institute
at New York Medical College in Valhalla, N.Y., acknowledged
that his talk was a departure from the other speeches at the
Feb. 28-March 2 conference on “Catholic Health Care Ethics:
The Tradition and Contemporary Culture.”
While most of the other addresses focused on a specific
ethical dilemma or field of bioethical study, Brother
Sulmasy said he wanted to stimulate conversation about “the
spirituality of being a caregiver.”
“All of those who have ever loved us inhabit us deeply now,”
he told participants in the conference. “This is true in a
smaller way of our patients.”
Brother Sulmasy spoke at length about the journey he
experienced in the late 1990s with a patient named Meg, who
died after a long fight with a rare form of cancer.
“I went to her funeral,” he said. “I needed to be there for
Meg, for her friends and for myself, and to let God know
that I had done the best that I could as a physician ... I
needed to understand (her death) not just as a notation on
her chart.”
Too often physicians feel guilt and grief after their
patients die but fail to acknowledge the feelings, instead
hiding behind an “‘I’m too busy’ excuse to cover up all
those emotions,” Brother Sulmasy said.
“Closure is never easy,” he said. “The dead bring all their
untied endings with them ... Dead patients are no more
compliant than living ones.”
But the Franciscan friar made clear that when he talks about
“communicating with the dead” he does not mean any occult
practices, the “fictional exploitation of the dead” that is
currently popular in the media or conversations with someone
who exists only in memory.
“Memories fade, but people do not fade and they can talk to
us,” he said. “It is not the occult, not memories, not just
agents of good deeds that can bear fruit” after a person has
died, he added.
“It is what we in the Catholic Church call the communion of
saints,” he said.
“Our dead patients are with us in that holy love that is
nowhere and everywhere,” Brother Sulmasy said. “If we could
but listen, we could hear our dead patients speak of that
love.” |
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Last modified:
11/21/2007
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