TY  - JOUR
T1  - POrtrait of an artist
AU  - Spencer R
Y1  - 2013/02/13
N1  - 10.1001/jama.2012.217484
JO  - JAMA
SP  - 557
EP  - 558
VL  - 309
IS  - 6
N2  - 
For the last five weeks since your death I have been writing about you, effusively expressing my gratitude to you and celebrating the way you humanized cancer for me, Nicki. I have spoken somewhat grandiloquently of compassion and the art of medicine, and of how you let me get to know you beyond your tumor. I meant every word of what I wrote, but grief is a funny, shape-shifting thing. My bold proclamations of gratitude now seem overblown and cloying, like self-congratulatory bravado, and my revelations about authentic patient care now appear dim, sophomoric, and one-dimensional. I have written many different versions of this letter—why can't I say just what I mean? Gratitude, sure, it's there: thank you for inviting me into your life, for teaching me about your art, and for telling me what it is like to have cancer. But what do I do with this sense of profound loss, of regret, of guilt? I tell medical school advisors that I want to be a pediatric neurosurgeon, and they advise me to “desensitize” myself to death; right now, I cannot imagine this, nor can I imagine it is a good thing, however necessary it might seem. I’ve said you brought the human element into medicine for me, but now I am not sure how I will ever be a physician and human both at once. Grief is messy and unquantifiable.

SN  - 0098-7484
M3  - doi: 10.1001/jama.2012.217484
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.217484
ER  -