A Doctor Crumbles in the Face of Death

Your article “Scared to Death” (Jan. 14) sounded a very deep chord in me. Aging, death and grief have become so abhorrent in our culture that it isn’t surprising that clinical depression has become a rampant dysfunction among the aging.

The saddest example of what the View article addressed was the behavior of my parents’ doctor of many, many years. He was revered by both of them. They never failed to take him homemade candies or chutneys or send cards to the office, and they always paid at the time of the visit rather than waiting for Medicare.

Yet his behavior, particularly during my father’s last hours, was shocking. He didn’t even look at my father, and, when my father was sedated but not unconscious, he pressed for my consent to an autopsy while standing in front of my father’s bed. Moments after my father’s death (having left the intensive-care unit to go to the cafeteria while his patient died), he again was adamant about the autopsy. No sympathy or kind words were offered.

My stepmother had died in another nearby hospital several months earlier. She was there several days, and this doctor never called or visited, even though he had been contacted by the doctor assigned to her.

I concluded that he was not only unwilling to deal with losing a patient, but was probably terrified of death. If our own doctors can’t deal with death, we really do have a reason to be scared.

KAREN KAYE

Los Angeles