Like many physicians, my life was surrounded by death, and my professional ambitions were dedicated to postponing its arrival at my patients’ bedside. Yet, when death appeared, I spent hours in its presence, sometimes in silence, sometimes to comfort, and other times rebelliously fighting against its ultimate outcome. 

Grief was a constant companion, but not only as a manifestation of humanity. A patient’s death, I thought, was a loss that raised many questions. Could I have done something more, were the right technologies employed, was my care appropriately guided by my desire to offer surgical expertise in the glove of loving kindness. My own grief was almost always accompanied by a degree of self-doubt, professional considerations, and spiritual contemplation that sometimes dominated my emotional state.

When we lose a friend, lover, parent, child, sibling, or any sentient being with whom we are close, especially one whose life we’ve shared for many years in one way or another, there is no alternative to grief. All the more, when a death is sudden, shocking, or unexpected. In the beginning, the numbness caused by such sorrow feels irremediable. Whether by physical separation or rifts in our spiritual being, the separation caused by death is experienced like a dis-appearance, or as the Canadian poet, Anne Carson, might say, a profound absence that disrupts time and memory. 

The death of a loved one, therefore, is like a tearing of one’s soul…the French word for it is déchirure. Pronounced deh-shee-RRHEWR, the word’s lingering third syllable is difficult to pronounce. The ‘ru’ is a rough, guttural ‘R’ sound, whereas the final ‘re’ evaporates into space only after a final flow of air is gently expulsed from between the speaker’s lips. The word stops itself. Like death, it is definitive and persistent. 

It seems grief is the price of survival. But though it wounds, it also teaches us to love more fully, and to recognize that manifestations of our affections are fleeting gifts, not permanent possessions. We thus learn to cherish each day, and to acknowledge how the departed’s absence is really a transformation, an unbreakable integration of the other into our thoughts, memories, and hearts.

Shortly after learning of Yann’s death, I took a walk through the cemetery of Montmartre, near where I was living, in Paris. The next day, I strolled among the graves in Montparnasse and meditated in the shadow of the mausoleum of a musician we both held dear. I ventured then to the cemetery of Père Lachaise, not looking for the place where my friend’s ashes rest, but for the memory of a moment shared more than fifty years ago. 

A memory without words.