Something between grief and gratitude

 It’s painful when an old friend dies. Having a collection of your friend’s letters and essays might not count as consolation, but it is something.

Here’s a line written by my friend Dr. Melvyn Schreiber, who died in October:

 

My kind will soon be extinct, and I like to think that will be a loss.

 

That was in a paragraph about how Melvyn loved to teach and practice medicine. Melvyn had a soft heart, but some physicians called him the conscience of the committee that ruled on medical students: thumbs up or down. Melvyn hated telling students that their dreams had derailed, but he did. He was aware of and honest about the medical profession’s capacity to do harm as well as good.

He often asked students what they were reading for pleasure and posed question about literature. He talked Shakespeare and then switched languages and talked Beethoven and Puccini. He told students they would have bad days as doctors and they needed to have an intellectual and artistic life outside of medicine to help them maintain a sense of balance.

Grief is a mysterious thing, but when you read a friend’s letters and feel gratitude … well, that’s something if it’s not consolation.

Today would have been Melvyn’s 94^th birthday.