• Cemetery Rounds: Encountering Former Patients' Graves

  • May 23 2023
  • Duración: 24 m
  • Podcast

Cemetery Rounds: Encountering Former Patients' Graves Por arte de portada

Cemetery Rounds: Encountering Former Patients' Graves

Escúchala gratis

Ver detalles del espectáculo

  • Resumen

  • TRANSCRIPT   Listen to ASCO’s Journal of Clinical Oncology essay, “Cemetery Rounds” by David Steensma, a hematologist-oncologist in Boston. The essay is followed by an interview with Steensma and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. Steensma describes the complex emotions that result from encountering graves of former patients on walks through a cemetery in his New England hometown. Narrator: Cemetery Rounds, by David Steensma, MD, FACP  In the summer of 1784, the body of a 4-month-old infant named Sally was the first to be laid in the earth of the hill next to my home. The gravedigger’s backhoe still cuts into the ground about once a week in what has become the largest cemetery in this Massachusetts town. During the recent pandemic, the graveyard was an open place with no need to wear a mask, so I often walked its quiet paths in the evening to stretch my legs after long hours hunched over a computer. These unhurried ambles were a chance to reflect on the day’s events and make plans for future days—and sometimes to ruminate on life and how it ends. Little Sally’s simple slate marker, with a willow and urn carved above the names of her parents and a short, grim epitaph—“A pleasant plant, a blooming flower, Cut down & wither’d in an hour”—has been joined by thousands of other tombstones over the past two centuries. After a dozen years living in this Boston suburb, I now recognize some of the names on these memorials: Stones that mark the final resting place of people who were once friends or fellow members of the same Congregational church that Sally’s family belonged to long ago, and stones with surnames shared by nearby schools and streets.  There are too many gravestones that recall young people who were once classmates of our children in the town’s schools. Walking past those memorials means remembering moments of shock and sadness: news about car wrecks and ski accidents, suicides, sudden collapses on hockey or football fields, and the other disasters that take the lives of the young. Stones for the 21st century children are all in the newest part of the cemetery, with its memorials for those who died within living memory. In that part of the cemetery, visitors still often leave toys, Boston Bruins or New England Patriots pennants, lacrosse sticks, and horse reins.  Sally’s stone, in contrast, is the oldest part of the cemetery. It is surrounded only by close cropped grass and stout trees. Once I saw a freshly cut flower laying on Sally’s grave, and I wondered who left it. It is rare to see those ancient graves get special attention—a bracing reminder that no matter how bright our star might shine in our own era, we will all eventually be forgotten. The largest and most prominent gravestone in the cemetery recalls the grandson of a local eccentric. This boy drowned in New Hampshire’s Lake Sunapee at age 17 while trying to save another teenager who had fallen from a boat. It was the second time a close family member of the man had drowned: In 1893, as a child, he watched his older sister slip beneath the swift water of the Annisquam River. He reacted to this pair of tragedies by declaring a lifelong war on gravity.  Grief is not always rational, although it may be productive. The eccentric man became wealthy—by predicting the 1929 stock market crash and by starting a successful business analysis firm—and he created a well-funded private foundation to understand and combat gravity. This Gravity Research Foundation sponsored important conferences attended by Albert Einstein and other luminaries and awarded prizes to Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, and a half-dozen Nobel laureates in physics. Gravity, however, remains unconquered and incompletely understood. All of us will eventually be pulled into the earth by its unrelenting grip. A growing number of gravestones bear the names of people who were once my patients at a Boston cancer institute. Some days it is hard to see those stones on my evening walks, noticing name after name that once graced a clinic schedule or hospital rounding list, and to be so starkly reminded of how our best efforts ultimately failed them.  Most of the time, though, what I recall are the happier moments with these patients, which keeps these walks from being morbid. Cancer centers are not known for being joyous places, yet surprisingly, often there is laughter in clinic rooms or on morning hospital rounds. We oncologists celebrate milestones with our patients: remissions achieved, college degrees completed, new grandchildren, and long awaited weddings attended. We know that graves like these await all of us, but for a while, we can put that aside and not just live but thrive. In one corner of the cemetery, a small marble bench faces a stone that marks the final resting place of one memorable former patient: A young woman with a wicked sense of humor who, as a grieving relative said at her funeral, was wise beyond her years, and taken ...
    Más Menos
activate_primeday_promo_in_buybox_DT
Más Menos

Lo que los oyentes dicen sobre Cemetery Rounds: Encountering Former Patients' Graves

Calificaciones medias de los clientes

Reseñas - Selecciona las pestañas a continuación para cambiar el origen de las reseñas.

Reseñas de Audible.com

Opiniones de Amazon
No hay comentarios disponibles