The Sacred Nature of Healing
Keynote Speech to the Creighton University School of Medicine Gold Humanism Honor Society Dinner & Ceremony, 18 March 2024
Thank you for inviting me tonight…
Following a severe hemorrhagic stroke on the right side of my mother’s brain, two board-certified, experienced physicians referred to her as “a miracle.”
Now, I don’t know much about the medical profession, but I imagine that that is a phrase that you — gathered here in this room — rarely use, and are likely even reluctant to say.
Despite the craniotomy to release the pressure on her brain that my father authorized following my mother’s life flight, opening her eyes again would be against-all-odds.
My mother defied those odds. As her body cleaned itself of blood that covered over 70 percent of her brain, my mother opened her eyes and tried to pull out one of her tubes three days after her surgery. The next day, she opened her eyes on command and kept them open for two minutes while my brother and sister-in-law talked about her grandsons.
Later that day, I wrote on my mother’s Caring Bridge website that our mom had achieved “medical miracle status confirmed by doctors.”
My mother remained in the hospital and then rehab for 80 days, making achingly slow progress, until she had another unsurvivable hemorrhagic stroke on the left side of her brain. Her strong and loving heart kept beating three more days after that, until she passed away on March 22nd, 2019.
My mother did not recover. She was not cured, but I do believe that, somehow in those 80 days, in some ways she was healed, and that she ushered in healing for myself and others.
The impetus of my invitation to this event tonight occurred because of a chat with Dr. Michael A. Greene around an open fire. As we discussed his work in training medical students, we realized just how much physicians and professionals in my world — international aid workers — had in common. And since Dr. Greene isn’t here tonight, I thought I’d offer up some shared context to begin:
We are do-gooders. “Do-gooder” is a catch-all term that I affectionately call all of us in the “helping professions”, for everyone engaged in “the work” making the world better, including the physicians, nurses, technicians, and other healthcare professionals in this room. Given tonight’s gathering, that is where I began as I prepared my speech for tonight, Here’s five things I have found that our helping professions have in common:
- The field of medicine and the nonprofit sector is broad and varied, but we are united in our purpose. We want to address suffering and see people thrive.
- Doing good is universal. Helpfulness is celebrated as a marker of good character across all cultures and stations in life.
- Doing good is also rife with obstacles and pitfalls. There’s way too much ego and too much swept under the rug in the shadow of “doing good.
- Thus, all do-gooders need feedback. We need people who offer vastly different lived experiences and worldviews because we often have to be accountable to ourselves first.
- And finally, doing good requires a continual source of humility and courage.
Listen, I don’t know what it is to try to deliver health care in a hospital, as much as you don’t know what it is to try to assess the aftermath of an earthquake and decide how much food aid will be needed over the next month.
I do know what it’s like to try to sit with pain and cognitive dissonance and questions that seem unanswerable — in my work, and after my mother’s stroke. But at the site of this mess, I believe healing can be found.
Given the title of this speech, “The Sacred Nature of Healing,” I suppose I should take a minute to share with you what I mean by the word “healing.”
For me, healing has meant being reconnected to the whole of “Life.” Healing has happened in spaces and places where I can be reminded I am not alone. It is ushered in by an acknowledgment and acceptance of my personal, sometimes devastating, truths. Healing is a process rooted in mystery, for which people can set the conditions, but can’t control the outcomes. To me, healing has meant starting to trust that I am supposed to be here on the planet, here in this room, now, with all of you.
To some, that may sound too big or too conceptual or too obtuse. But here’s the good news:
If healing is reconnecting to the whole of us, then even the pursuit of meaningful connection can be healing.
And to be fully present with another person — to be open and listening in ways that suspend judgment and that open up possibilities…I believe this is sacred.
As physicians and as humanists, everyday in your work, you have an opportunity to be present to another person’s experience of Life. While you may have exciting and life-saving technologies available to you in your practice, healing in my own life has drawn upon ancient technologies — sitting around a kitchen table or a fire, singing together, breathing, making art, honoring ancestors, and being in ritual.
To me, what is sacred and eternal within the practice of medicine and the sites of the kind of healing I have experienced have one thing in common: togetherness.
Now, if you are here in this room, listening to me right now, like many people in the humanitarian sector where I work, you likely have high regards for “smarts.” Your brains — they’re working for you.
Regardless of how bright you are, I also suspect that your brains are not what first got you interested in medicine, in “doing good.”
It was your heart.
It was your heart, that source of love and generosity and compassion.
When it comes to the sacred nature of healing in our work, we as do-gooders must dwell more often where we are connected to each other. It’s in our hearts that we become first aware that we are capable of taking better care of each other.
When it’s hard to get our brains around all this brokenness and dis-ease in our world, our hearts know the incalculable sacredness woven within our human frailty. It is in their hearts that my mother’s physicians still believed in miracles.
Yes, our hearts get broken every day as we try to make the world a healthier place or a fairer place. Not only have I had to accept the limitations of what we can individually achieve in this rapidly changing swirl of our global lives, in my own experience following my mother’s death, I have had to cultivate ever-more tolerance for the uncontrollable and surrender to the unknowable — which our reptilian and limbic brains often thwart.
In order to heal, I have had to be humbled.
I believe that poetry is another site where healing can be found, so I will offer two tonight in this speech. (Hey, poets gotta poet.) What I revel in with poems is that they ask us to slow down and be present.
The first tonight is a poem I wrote about an interaction I had with a physician the day after my mother died:
In/obtrusive
He called at 6:30am
the morning after my mother died,
the morning after I sat in a small,
windowless room in the E.R.,
flanked by my cousin and my aunt, on either side,
furiously searching for an “answer” in
the legalese of her DNR
for an answer to the doctor’s question,
“If she fails…do you want us to…?”
The caller the next day had so much believed
that my mother would recover, he said.
I had met him only once.
He was kind, but
why oh why was this call necessary?
My mother’s body’s “failure,” perhaps,
he was taking as his own.
With what false narratives
had my mother’s husband filled
this rehab doctor’s head?
Ego to ego, had they bonded,
charting a course my mother
could and would never traverse?
He had enough ego to wake me,
wake me on the first day
of a world I could not
recognize, a world
without my mother.
One where him, his failure,
meant not one iota to me.
A world in which I
had absolutely
no interest
in his comfort.
Now, many people might want me to focus on the kindness of this physician in terms of reaching out to me, even if his call came at a rude time of the day. But as the poem hopefully suggests, it was clear to me that it had more to do with him than either my mother or myself. He thought she would recover, but this physician had only known my mother for days. There had been less than a week between leaving the rehabilitation hospital for her “lack of progress” and the second stroke. What he understood about my mother, or her situation was limited, to say the least.
I, who had known my mother since the day I was born, felt like I didn’t fully know her. My mother, a former teacher and then nonprofit executive, and always a farmer, had plenty of traits to sing about — her kindness, her dedication, her positivity — all traits I try to emulate in my own life and work, and that I feel so lucky she modeled for me.
But my mother was a whole person. She had flaws. Like all of us, she made some questionable decisions and was unconscious of things in her life too. You see, the 80 days of her hospitalization, included a deeper awakening to the level of narcissistic abuse from her alcoholic husband that she endured for her entire marriage.
Her husband, my father, whom she had cared for (in all ways) for 46 years, was unable to reciprocate adequate care for her when she needed it most. During this period, I had to put myself between my mother and father in many ways — bodily, legally, spiritually, and in community.
What I know was that my mom was seemingly healthy when I had seen her just six days prior to her first stroke, and when I had spoken to her on the phone the night before. My mother had no pre-existing conditions — she was active, thin. She cared about nutrition. I also know: Three months prior, I had visited my parents for a few days. I could tell that something was off and that my father’s serious drinking habits had returned. I could tell that my mother’s anxiety was at a heightened level.
I also know that traumatic brain injuries, like my mother had, are common and poorly studied or understood among survivors of domestic violence. As a child, I know I witnessed my father use physical violence to control and terrorize my mother.
What I will never know is if/how my father contributed to my mother’s death.
I have to live with this not knowing.
I offer you this context to show some of the reasons why the 6:30 call from this physician to share his “shock” at my mother’s death represented a self-importance that felt like hubris to me. A lack of humility about what he didn’t or couldn’t know. A lack of humility that he is just one part of a bigger system of care-givers and takers surrounding my mother. He was such a small part of her world and all that she had already survived when her death did come.
What my mother’s hospitalization taught me is that when modern medicine, the love of family, the support of community, a higher power, and my mother’s strength combined, it was hard to be anything but hopeful. I also am still learning about the true nature of violence, about disappointment and despair and sorrow.
As physicians, how will you allow yourself to be moved, challenged, and humbled by what you don’t know? By what you cannot know?
Our cultural conditioning means that people often have unhelpful stereotypes and assumptions about who survivors are. This is why tonight I wanted to share more aspects of who my mother was, not just that she was a silent survivor of domestic violence.
The outpouring of support for my mother during those 80 days in the hospital was sometimes overwhelming. Managing her “public”, those whose lives she had touched as students, or colleagues, or neighbors, or friends, people who wanted to help, became part of my role in supporting her in the hospital. It offered such a vantage point for me about how interconnected we all are, and I am confident that her knowledge of how much she was loved eased her transition.
I pause here and offer another poem about my mother’s strength:
She would wail
She would wail,
as Hallmark sentiments
were extended, and people shared
boxed, pastel expressions of concern and love.
I would stop and ask gently,
“Do you want me to stop reading, mom?”
“No,” she would indicate with the established two-fingers sign.
It sounded like torture, like depths,
but that wail was love
being poured
into old, deep
cracks.
The wails were the RUSH,
the water giving way
to a new flow.
The reality of my mother’s condition made it clear that my abusive, alcoholic father could in no way be left responsible for her welfare. My two younger brothers and I would go on to take precautions to ensure that my incapacitated mother would never be under my father’s care. We put family secrets transparently on the table. Our parents’ generation, aunts and uncles on both sides plagued with shame or guilt, would abandon us in these efforts.
All of this truth-telling that was required among our family meant I have become more and more committed to:
Saying the hard thing, out loud.
In her last days on earth, my mother taught me that saying the hard thing can give way to doing the brave thing. She taught me that healing is possible and my voice is even stronger than I thought.
And most importantly, now I live and write and speak to show others:
So. is. yours. There’s no time to waste.
So I ask you here tonight, what does it mean to practice medicine in a way that shows up for the sacred? That ushers in healing, not just “the cure”?
I don’t have those answers. Only you do.
Only you, working every day in an imperfect, and perhaps even deeply flawed healthcare system, know what else is possible for patient care.
And you are not the only ones who have those answers. Patients do too. Your colleagues do too, especially those who are interacting with patients more frequently.
So what do they need from you to offer up their truths?
What do you need to be fully present for them?
Can you consider this moment and every moment that you have with a patient or a colleague as an opening, an invitation for healing?
Not only because you bring the skills and knowledge and technology, but because you can be braver together. What if every single patient holds the potential to change and heal you too?
What inside the system needs to change for patients to get the care they deserve, and that you deserve to offer?
Whether you’ve been a person known for speaking up your whole life, or you’re a person to whom the role of observer is more comfortable, I need you.
We need you.
For you who may be more reluctant to speak up about the needed changes in the healthcare system, it’s time to push beyond your boundaries. For those who have been speaking out, keep going. Physicians occupy a critical place in that system, where you can immediately exert your influence on a daily basis.
When it comes to speaking up, every person has their own conscious or unconscious calculation. Yes, there are consequences for it; feathers could be ruffled. You can be misunderstood, judged, shut down, chastised, at worst, fired. That which we often value most — stability, security, predictability — could be upended. But often what the peril we imagine in our heads is rarely as risky as we think. Centering patients requires us to examine our fears and get real about what holds back the healthcare system. It requires humility and courage.
In my journey, as a daughter and as a do-gooder, I’ve learned that healing happens in a split second or imperceptibly over time. It includes childhoods, and livelihoods, and history — from the interpersonal to the global.
Integrity, compassion, humanism are choices made by your heart. Your brain — sharp as it is — can’t deliver these things on its own.
So this is my wish for all us do-gooders, from medicine to education and social work to philanthropy and ministry: that we are surrounded with kind and smart and generous people who help us make meaning of our efforts, who push us to reflect and grow, and get beyond ourselves with more honesty, humility and courage.
Thank you for helping me to make meaning of my mother’s life and death and for letting me honor her with you. I may not “technically” know much about healing the body, but I do know that people start to heal the moment they feel heard.
With the climate crisis, political chaos and authoritarianism, and extractive economic systems bearing down on us, I want to build and be part of a world where we can heal — a world where we can experiment, where we can connect and belong, where we can wonder and celebrate and relax and grieve and be confused…together. That is why I am so glad the Creighton Gold Humanism Honor Society exists.
May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light, and hope not only to your patients, but to every single person with whom you work.
Thank you and good night.
