“I Could a Tale Unfold Whose Lightest Word Would Harrow Up Thy Soul”
I received a disturbing shock last week while walking through a local shopping mall. It involved the ghost of one of my patients who had recently died. The horror of the situation didn’t hit me at first, but within seconds I was overcome with panic and hurried my pace, afraid to turn around and look again. After I recovered my senses I spent the rest of the afternoon pondering the significance of the event. My emotions alternated between embarrassment and dismay until I finally reached a reconciliation with myself and was able to move on to the remainder of my day.
You see, what happened was not that I saw a ghost, but that I wanted to see a ghost but couldn’t.
While strolling down the hall I saw the wife of a patient of mine who struggled for months to live with metastatic cancer. He was a weekly visitor to my office before finally succumbing to his disease, a patient whose suffering was heartbreaking to observe - truly a memorable patient.
Or so I thought. As I crossed the path of his wife that day, walking just fast enough to be past her before my brain could identify her place in my memory, I suddenly realized that I could not recall the name nor the face of her husband. Too humiliated to turn and call out to her, I wandered on aimlessly, searching and searching for a face to go with hers, the face of a man I once knew well, a face that withered before my eyes and then, like a mask left behind after an elegant affair, was placed inside an old trunk, forgotten forevermore.
Eventually I remembered him and how he sat quietly next to his wife through all those visits, full of misery and apprehension. Now he exists only in the mind, a ghost who can only appear if summoned from the tangled nest of names and faces that, no longer noticed, have faded from memory.
Wherever my patient is now I want him to know that he has not been forgotten - he is welcome to haunt me at his leisure, which I assume is limitless. Like Hamlet pacing on the ramparts of Elsinore, doctors also need to see ghosts. It reminds them of the gravity of their work, of the sorrow that strangles a woman as she walks alone down a corridor crowded with strolling lovers.
