Editor's Note
Why Write?
The day after my parents were killed in a plane crash in 2004, I sat down to write. I didn’t know what I would write or even exactly why I felt I had to sit down at the keyboard. I did know that I felt a sense of chaos as shock collided with loss and merged with grief. Tears washed away laughs as I described on the screen who my parents were to me, to our extended family, and, especially, to each other.
Memories popped up with surprising ease for someone who has been accused of forgetting most of his childhood. I turned them into stories about my parents from the time before I knew them, when I was growing up, when they were interacting with my own children. And I wrote about our last visit a few months before their death. When I turned off the computer, the shock, the loss, and the grief were still there. Yet, I walked away from my keyboard with a sense of perspective and even a sort of peace about the wrenching events of the previous 24 hours. My writing had been powerful medicine.
The writing experience is different for everyone. For some such as sportswriter Red Smith, it is painful and draining: You “sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” For others such as prolific science fiction master Isaac Asimov, it is almost a physiological necessity: “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” And for biographer Sharon O’Brien, it is a treasure hunt: “Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.” For many, writing isn’t like drafting the high school term paper with its outlines and 3x5 cards spelling out what you’re going to say before you say it. What you have to say changes as it unfolds.
But in a full life, there are so many other things to do. Why would busy physicians consider sitting down with pen or keyboard? Writing takes time and, as Red Smith observed, can bleed your emotions. Adding that to 20 patient visits or five surgeries a day seems like something few would want to do. Yet as the two dozen physicians and medical students who submitted entries for this year’s writing contest can attest, there are rewards, even if you don’t win the contest. You get to tell a tale from this amazing work we physicians do. You get to pause from that work, think about it, and see what it means. And you get to let that work enter your being and change you and the way you view it.
The piece I wrote the day after my parents’ deaths became a eulogy that I delivered at two memorial services, one in my hometown in Illinois and one in my parents’ adopted home in Florida. As I read my words in front of friends and family, I stumbled, I sniffled, I laughed. And when I finished, I realized I knew my parents and myself better and that the healing process had begun.