Wander & Wonder

“If you want your grandparents to be great-grandparents, you have to get on it.”

Those were the last words he said to me. He said it with a rasp, but there was a distinct glint in his eye as if he was getting in one final tease before he drifted into sleep for the last time. I froze for a second before laughing… here he was at the very end of his journey, yet he seemed more concerned about the hypothetical timeline of my family planning than his own end of life.

In medicine, it is easy to get caught up in the impulse to “fix things”, so stepping into a room where there is nothing left to cure can feel counterintuitive at first. However, the longer I sat with him, the more that clinical instinct faded away and revealed the simpler human one beneath it. Before I ever learned how to be a doctor, I knew how to be a person, and that is really all this moment required. It was not about algorithms or treatments, just about sitting with another human being, rather than a patient.

In his final moments, he refused to be defined by his disease or viewed as just a palliative patient. He was a man with a sense of humor who was intent on passing a bit of wisdom to the younger generation before he left. By joking about my future, he was reminding me that while I am busy worrying about my rotations, life is happening outside the hospital walls and I should not miss it. I went into this rotation thinking I was there to help him die comfortably, which I think I did, but he also ended up teaching me how to live.