Life Lessons from The Talking Dead

Winding down from the three-day Labor Day weekend I found myself on Hulu streaming a 2017 HLN episode of Inside with Chris Cuomo, The Talking Dead. It was late Monday night, I was procrastinating from turning in and so I watched with some morbid curiosity, intently engaged yet intermittently dozing off during the show’s 42-minute commercial free run.

Throughout the program, Chris shadowed and interviewed Laredo, Texas Medical Examiner Dr. Corrine Stern. I’ll not trouble you with any of the gory details of her patients’ demises or the methods the M.E.’s office uses to try and complete the horrific and difficult task of identifying the remains of those who died trying to migrate from Mexico and other Central American countries to the United States via dangerous, failed border crossing attempts. I’d rather home in on what Dr. Stern does to leave the office behind each day, and why. I’m glad I pushed through the gory autopsy room segments and stayed sufficiently awake for the closing ten minutes of the show.

Despite a hectic 7-day work week, Dr. Stern makes time to raise the many animals on her home farmstead. She’s a compassionate, caring, and dedicated medical professional, yet she assures Chris, “I’m not haunted by what I do, I can certainly go home and relax on my farm and not think about this office…I have to…I cannot take care of my patients if I cannot take care of myself.”

I suspect that these are the same types of strategies and self-care techniques my wife Susan uses as a Hospice RN, and perhaps many clinicians here at Dana-Farber use to maintain their own healthy longevities in oncology careers. In both hospice and oncology, medical professionals regularly bear witness to heavy emotional tragedies and losses well intermixed with resounding triumphs and success stories. Maybe Sue’s daily gardening time means way more to her than simply weeding, watering, and plucking ripe tomatoes from the vines.

Whether our experiences come from being a clinician, clinic support staffer, family member, caregiver, or friend, we all eventually come to know intimately that “death is so finite,” according to Dr. Stern.

Chris asks the M.E. what has the job changed in her after all these years. “It has made me appreciate life, life is fragile, I know that now. We need to take care of ourselves. We don’t know what’s going to happen…I do not take life for granted.

“When I die, I do not want to be identified by what my career is; this is not what I want to be remembered by. I want people to remember me as…she that farm and she raised goats and she showed her horse.”

This makes me think about how I want to spend my time. It’s easy enough to go to work, come home, operate on auto pilot. Without much thought, days can become weeks, months, even years. At that minimum, it would be hard to define my life by much more than some of the project work I do, and that I have a couple of cute Shetland Sheepdogs whose pictures I share on Facebook and for which I can get a whole bunch of likes.

Life is indeed fragile and uncertain. I learned that the hard way a few years ago, so I am actively taking more cognizant steps to make the most of whatever time I have, to try and ensure a life well lived. I’m doing great but hey, you never know.

I’ve recently fully serviced and installed new super-grippy twisty-road carving tires on my Ducati Monster, and have already put more miles on it these last few weeks than in the last 3 ½ years combined. I’ve dusted off golf clubs that have sat stationary since moving here to Massachusetts 6 years ago and played this weekend the first round of what I hope are many more golf outings to come. I’m enjoying spending a few hours each weekend doing the yardwork and gardening that Susan always had dibs on. And, I try more and more lately to leave my iPhone at home or tucked away while I do other things.

I am deliberately and thoughtfully reincorporating these activities and others that I enjoy back into a life that I truly appreciate and love, to try and make sure I don’t take it all for granted. Similar to Dr. Stern, I don’t want to be remembered someday just for a few good projects and a few good puppy pix.