There is a particular kind of grief that medicine does not prepare us for: losing someone you love while understanding exactly how hard everyone tried to save them.
My cousin died from cancer only months ago. But to me, she was never simply my cousin. She was my little sister in every way that mattered. Someone I loved instinctively, someone I felt responsible for protecting long before illness entered our lives. Perhaps that is what grief keeps whispering to me now, that I was supposed to protect her, and somehow I failed.
This is not a new story in medicine. We speak about death often. We discuss prognosis, suffering, and grief regularly. But knowledge does not soften loss when it finally becomes your own. The wound is deeper when you experience it from the other side of the bed.
Since her death, I have walked hospital corridors carrying two identities: physician and grieving family member. One part of me understands disease trajectories, prognostic indicators, laboratory deterioration, treatment failure, and the limitations of medicine. The other remembers her laughter, her voice, her children, the good times, and the unbearable silence left behind after she was gone.
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Medical knowledge did not protect me from grief. If anything, it deepened it. I recognized subtle decline long before it was spoken aloud. I noticed the changing tone in conversations, the shift from curative treatment toward comfort, and the quiet moments when hope slowly began disappearing from the room.
I recognized those moments. I saw the worsening scans, the exhaustion, the gradual transition from fighting disease to preserving comfort. As a physician, I understood what those signs meant. As someone who loved her deeply, I refused to believe them.
Sometimes I ask myself why I held onto hope so fiercely despite everything unfolding before me. Perhaps denial was not ignorance, but mercy. Perhaps God placed that hope in my heart so I could continue speaking to her with light instead of fear, allowing her to remain surrounded by hope rather than sorrow until the very end.
I did not need a miracle. I did not need certainty that she would fully recover. I only wanted time. A few more years. For her children. For her parents. For us. Sometimes love does not ask for forever. Sometimes it only begs for a little more time.
What hurts most is not guilt. It is absence. The realization that someone who was once woven naturally into everyday life is suddenly no longer there. The understanding that life continues moving around you while part of your world has permanently stopped. She was gone too soon, and no medical explanation makes that easier to accept.
And perhaps the hardest part is returning to work while carrying that pain silently. I continued discussing treatment plans, teaching residents, reassuring families, and walking into operating rooms while feeling as though I were bleeding beneath my scrubs. Alongside grief existed helplessness, anger, and moments of resentment toward medicine itself, the same profession to which I devoted my life, because it could not save someone I loved.
Her death changed the way I practice medicine. Now, when families ask the same question repeatedly, I understand they are not always searching for information; sometimes they are trying to survive emotionally. When they hold onto minor improvements despite poor prognoses, I understand that hope can exist beside awareness. What clinicians sometimes interpret as denial may instead represent love attempting to endure the unbearable. Sometimes hope is not denial. Sometimes it is survival.
Personal grief has also forced me to confront a deeper truth about medicine: Physicians are not emotionally separate from the suffering they witness. Beneath professional composure, many clinicians quietly carry losses that continue shaping the way they speak, listen, and care for others.
In Islam, we believe every soul returns to God at its appointed time. No matter how deeply we love someone or how desperately we try to hold on, their return has already been written. That belief brings me peace in moments when grief feels otherwise impossible to contain.
“لم يُصِبْنَا إِلَّا مَا كَتَبَ اللَّهُ لَنَا”
“Nothing befalls us except what Allah has written for us.”
I remind myself of this when guilt becomes too heavy. Perhaps healing is not learning how to stop grieving. Perhaps it is learning how to carry love, loss, faith, and unanswered questions together within the same heart.
And perhaps that is what it means to remain human, even beneath the scrubs.
Fatemah Qasem is an obstetric anesthesiologist in Kuwait.
