http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/opinion/sunday/how-to-tell-a-mother-her-child-is-dead.html
Wow, just wow.
Incredible. Goes to show the amount of pain the doctors go through with a news like that.
Whst a powerful piece of writing.
I don’t even want to think of that room, and that family, and how it is easy to tell which person is the mother of the son who was just shot. I don’t want to think about what it means that a doctor has enough experience that she’s now an expert in telling a mother her son has been shot to death. I don’t want to live in a world where a doctor develops that sort of expertise.
Outstanding writing. It packs a wallop in under 1000 words, and the subject matter is not doing the heavy lifting. The writer is.
Despite the topic, I may bookmark it for some of my college essay writers. It’s a superb example of efficient, evocative storytelling.
I read this piece in yesterday’s NYTIMES Week in Review. What an extremely powerful piece of writing. I was really choked up and it just resonates.
Stopped short in my tracks. Amazing and amazingly sad. 
I didn’t want to read the link before I went to work today. Then I got home, and casually looked at FB. My long distance friend posted a picture of her 3 sons, then commented that X… , age 20, just died from an accident. He was a twin. My friend lost her husband some years ago. I can only imagine the pain.
I hope her doctor was as sensitive as the one in the article.
“Now you explode the world.” This resonates with me. I can’t imagine how the police notified my sister’s in-laws that their oldest grandson had died (he’d been staying with them, so their address was in his pocket). 
The world still feels shattered.
A compassionate professional can make a world of difference in that situation. Nothing shields you from the pain and the horror. But the littlest acts of kindness will be remembered forever. I know.
I know it’s a much, much lesser issue, but being told you (or a loved one) has a serious chronic progressive condition and/or cancer also is an explosion of the world.
I get that it’s not the same magnitude, but I hope others get told about these issues with more care and sensitivity than I did.
It’s pretty awful to be given a diagnosis out of the blue, with no warning, support, help, nothing and further BLAMED for not getting medical attention sooner. I’m not sure whether it’s lack of training, lack of time, insensitivity or what. All I can say is it’s devastating and I never went back to that doctor again.
There isn’t a good way of telling anybody. My son’s girlfriend called and told us he died.
I’m so sorry for all who have received tragic news. I agree there really is no “good” way–tho there are better and worse ways.
My H did this many, many times. He worked in the main trauma center of NJ, as a pediatrician. I read him the first line, “First you get your coat” and I lost him there. Getting his coat was the last thing on his mind.
I can’t begin to convey what being that person, the one who had that conversation over and over, did to him. I told him he should have written this story.
He has told it many times.
I have fortunately never had to be the bearer of such news. But I’ve been close to those who have…
“First you get your coat”…
I thought of this phrase as a powerful metaphor for wrapping oneself in a familiar security blanket of professionalism.
How the “white coat” is a cloak of authority in an emergency room and reminds the wearer of their mission to steel themselves for tough decisions to be made and deal with hard and sometimes heartbreaking situations.
Great writing.
I truly empathize with whomever has had this experience. Either as the giver or receiver.
H says he never wore a white coat, once he was beyond med student, and had any say in the matter.
I can see it’s good writing, but having lived this at second hand, I had trouble with it. The issue was never whether he was snapping at his wife, or, his small kids–in our house–as it was. That was never the issue at all. “The issue was that a mother lost her kid.” (his words.)
My take was that she felt she was damned lucky to be coming home to a living husband, even if his socks were, yet again, on the floor, while at the same time a mother was going home without her son.
Reminds me of this
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/03/19/doctor-photo-grieving-dead-patient_n_6905290.html
I’ve delivered that news, albeit different circumstances. Great reading for all those whose professions demand such encounters. You can’t screw it up. You at least owe that to the family.
The author described it perfectly. I feel for those who have to deliver such news on a regular basis but as painful as it is to deliver the news, it’s not our world that stopped turning on that day.
What a powerful essay. Short sentences can deliver a powerful message. Thanks for sharing. I can’t bring myself up to sharing this with my future MD…