December 2020

My patient, Mary Kay, was a take-charge person. Even after a surgical error left her legs completely paralyzed, at age 48, she adjusted well to living in a nursing home and was dynamic, intelligent, and dedicated to her family and friends. Some of her friends even enjoyed a weekly martini with her.

After her tragic medical experience, but before I assumed her care, Mary Kay’s husband, unable to live without her, had taken his own life. Thereafter, with the best of intentions, her family withheld other unpleasant news from her, including hiding her granddaughter’s chronic fluctuating illness. Mary Kay secretly became despondent and overdosed on her medication.

“Hi, Sue,” I said. “Here’s my letter of retirement.”

“You know I don’t want to hear this,” she replied.

“Yes, but the time has come, and I’ve been clear about my intentions for several months.”

“Do you think you could work a few extra months so you can help us find and train your replacement?”

When I was straight out of residency training, my first practice was on a small island off the coast of New England. I embraced the challenge of providing the full range of services that I had learned as a family physician, but that definitely proved to be an uphill climb on a number of levels, both personal and professional.

Although I soon felt very connected with the islanders in general and my patients, my wife and I missed our families back in New York and the familiar offerings of a  suburban community. So after three years, I decided to move to the mainland (or “America,” as the locals called it) to continue clinical practice there and the teaching that I had begun to do with a nearby medical school and residency program.

I frequently let endings dominate my life. My leaving home for graduate school ended my secure life under the care of my parents. My marriage ended my existence as a single woman who charted her own course, while my divorce ended my status as a married woman. Retiring ended my decades as a middle school teacher. The death of my parents ended my identity as a child and gave me a new persona as a sixty-seven-year-old orphan.

I have tried to teach myself, especially during these pandemic days of isolation and introspection, that with each ending comes a beginning. Life continues, even if the tomorrows take on different hues, scents and sounds than the todays and yesterdays. Just as the red light only temporarily stops my journey until the green light restarts it, so do I have the ability to create a beginning to a life that has ended.

Therein, however, lies the challenge. I have the ability to start over, to find a new way to garner meaning and purpose from my life, but do I have the mental stamina to do so? As a person with a proclivity towards depression, it is difficult for me to muster the