Hippocratic Oaths by Raymond Tallis

Author:Raymond Tallis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

7

Representations and Reality

From grief to grievance

This [the organ retention furore] has been a difficult business for the medical profession. I believe we have been victims of poor and badly applied law, and have been let down by one aberrant pathologist. Our desire to shield patients and their relatives from some of the more distressing aspects of illness and death has been pejoratively derided as paternalism. The long-standing intention to learn and teach, even after a patient’s death, has been debased, in many commentators’ words, as morbid curiosity or worse.

John Bennett1

In the early hours of the morning, when I am most actuely aware of the random brutality of the world and my entire life seems an exposed surface, the fear that something terrible may happen to one of my sons cuts deepest. For a few moments I can begin to imagine what it must be like to be a bereaved parent. All bereavement brings the sense of a shared journey broken off; where it is a child who has died, this must be intensified by the poignancy of the lost future: growing up, love, marriage, a career, having children, making a difference in the world, of preparation for a life that never started.

And there is a sense of responsibility, which, as the melancholic diarist H-F Amiel says, ‘mortally envenoms grief ’.2 It is guilt of the survivor: I continue, surrounded by these daily things, consumed by everyday preoccupations, while my child is nowhere and no longer. To be predeceased by one’s child is to suffer an inversion of that natural order in which the elders are closer to death. The outrageously unfair survivor guilt of the bereaved parent is worsened by the feeling that one failed in a fundamental duty: I did not save my child; I consented to an operation that killed him; I did not protect him from harm; I might have done more; I watched helplessly while he died. Now I can’t hug him, comfort him, take his hand, rock him to sleep. He is nowhere, or somewhere quite alone.

The loss of a child awakens other, unbearable, feelings: that someone so small should have suffered adult-sized experiences; that death and dying should take root in the tiny body and the uncomprehending mind of a child. Charlotte Mew’s ‘Exspecto Resurrectionem’, a poem on the death of her five-year-old brother of scarlet fever, captures this. She asks God to give some ordinary comfort to her little brother:

Dost Thou a little love this one

Shut in tonight,

Young and so piteously alone,

Cold – out of sight?

Thou know’st how hard and bare

The pillow of that new-made narrow bed

Then leave not there,

So dear a head!3

And so I imagine how it must be, or imagine that I can imagine it. Although I might intuit the sharpest pangs, I can’t really think into the endless parched places of grief. The chronic sorrow of a bereaved parent is unnarratable and inconceivable to all who have not suffered from it.

It is the very intensity of such emotions that makes them liable to expropriation.

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