Years of listening to my patients’ stories of pain and grief, I thought I understood what loss does to a person, until it was my turn. As a physician, specialized in psychiatry, I thought when it was my turn I would be able to cope. Until I did not. Loss is an inevitable part of our mortal human life; it’s the ultimate consequence of being human.
When I experienced the sudden unexpected loss of my father who was healthy and had many plans for the future I was unable to function. My nervous system had an absolute collapse of the unfathomable way of moving forward with life.
This loss created a sense of purposelessness and despair that I have never felt in my being before. I finally understood depression, I finally understood waking up every morning questioning what is the purpose of life when it literally can be taken away from you in a moment with your heart stopping and it being too late. That is what happened to my father, a routine day – work, gym, home for dinner and that was it.
Yet, a few weeks later, I got myself through the hospital doors. Patients were waiting, colleagues needed respite from covering my overnight call shifts and that is what I did, I went back. I wore a mask, put on my blazer and pretended like I was fine. Underneath the façade, there was a complete erosion of my identity as a physician, and a therapist. I felt like a fraud listening to my patients in pain, allowing them a space to heal whilst I was falling apart on the inside and pretending I was fine.
When you have been functioning your whole life, pushing yourself through medical school, working through the sick days, ignoring your body’s messages when you need to eat or use the bathroom on a twenty-four call shift, it is of course natural that you would not know how to take care of yourself and listen to your nervous system’s cry for help when experiencing a big loss.
This loss, however deeply painful, allowed me to reconstruct my way of being. It allowed me to think about how we function in society and how high-functioning women often move through life ignoring the signals of their nervous systems and working in override.
Each symptom whether it’s fatigue that is not cured with sleep, irritability at the smallest things are signals, yet we override these signals until a point of collapse reaches. The symptoms are small alerts; we ignore these alerts until the alarm goes off and it then becomes hard to turn that off.
Loss taught me to listen to my signals, and to learn to listen to the signals of my patients. It allowed me the language through deep empathy to know what my patients can feel in those deep moments of despair and pain.
Eventually the cloak had to come off as I could not hide behind the curtain of “I am fine” and being truly authentic and organic about the moments of “I am not fine” created a language that I never experienced before. I leave you with one thought. If you are not fine, say it, the sequelae that will arrive from that might be deeply liberating and healing.
We live in a world of “I am fine”, we allow five bereavement days in many corporate cultures and we do not have the language for grief and loss, yet it is the most universal experience that every human being will experience. If each of us creates space for the experience, the language will follow and the humanism that should be experienced after loss will naturally follow.
Name: Dr. Devina Wadhwa
Professional Title: Bscpharm, Md, Frcpc, Psychiatrist
Bio: Dr. Devina Wadhwa is a psychiatrist, writer, and speaker whose work explores burnout, grief, emotional wellness, and the human side of medicine. She writes and speaks about resilience, mindfulness, and the hidden emotional lives of high-functioning women, caregivers, and health professionals.
