Beautiful Souls

This trip across the Atlantic has been an emotional one, partly due to the intensity of the Kenyan wards and also because of reasons much closer to home. In mid-September, we learned of the passing of a good friend and choir buddy back in Indianapolis. While she had spent some time in hospice care at her home, we grieved her loss from many miles away.

And now, today, we learned about the passing away of my dear grandpa Phil. While also neither sudden nor unexpected, it was still a great emotional blow, especially to learn about so far from home.

Grief is such an individual experience, and as a physician I have both the advantage and the disadvantage of experiencing death and grief in a very objective way. So objective, it seems, that I don’t know quite how to deal with it personally. We spent most of today, our last day in London (as planned) the only way we could in such a situation: lights off, curtains drawn, in silence.

My grandfather battled over the last decade with leukemia, bone marrow transplants, infections, graft-versus-host-disease, and chronic lung infections. Despite his all-too-frequent trips to various hospitals across Indiana, I will always remember and admire my grandfather’s perseverance, positive attitude, and faithful spirit. Though his leukemia diagnosis in 2000 started a tumultuous and at times heartbreaking last decade of his life, it was also one of great milestones and triumphs in our family. Five grandchildren graduated from high school, two from college, one from medical school; two grandchildren married, a seventieth birthday, a fiftieth wedding anniversary, and even the birth of an eighth grandchild – these are just a few of the many, many celebrations we’ve had in our family since 2000. He had said, and I truly believe it, that he would not have traded the last ten years of his life for anything. I hope that when my time comes, I can say the same thing.

And so we grieve. Individually, and as a family. We grieve not as for the young, in a life lost too soon. Our grief is a mixture of sorrow for ourselves, for the loss of a presence in our lives, as well as joy and celebration. We celebrate the ending of pain, of suffering, of being trapped in a failing earthly body.
My medical training has brought me greater understanding over the past few years of everything that Grandpa went through. Despite the knowledge of the risks and tolls of two bone marrow transplants and the severity of the myriad infections he suffered, I will not remember him this way. To me, he will always live in my mind’s eye, in my heart, as the young, strong, whistling farmer in overalls who could do no wrong in young Meagan and Brant’s eyes. In my childhood, he knew everything, could do everything, could be anything. Quick with a corny joke, never a man to lose at cards, and always demonstrating a love for his land and for his animals, these were the essence of my ‘Pa, to me. And they always will be.

Today, thinking about Andrea and Grandpa Phil, thinking about these two Beautiful Souls who have passed from this world in the last two months, I am finally ready to go home.