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Several years ago, I read one of my poems, “I’m Still Your Doctor,” at the World AIDS Day memorial service, I was surprised that my voice broke as I spoke. I felt ambushed by my feelings. But that’s the nature of grief, especially for healthcare workers. We tend to stuff grief down instead of processing it, so it sneaks up on us at unexpected and unwanted times.

Once, I started crying as I combed my hair in the morning, getting ready to go to work. Was it resentment at overwork, or lack of sleep? Yes, but also, a patient had just died. Not my first patient to die, nor the last. But the first one I found myself grieving for. I wrote this poem many years later, which appears in my chapbook, Rope Made of Bandages.

How to Grieve

Don’t tell your patient how sad
you are that he stopped
taking his meds.

Keep your professional face on.
Tell him there’s no use
in regret. We need

to move forward. After he dies,
don’t be surprised at the tears
that slide down your face

as you comb your hair and get ready to go
back into the hospital, see other
patients in the same room

where he died. Healing touch is too much.
Let your masseuse try hands-off Reiki,
which also doesn’t work.

Let her talk you into Transformational
Breathing, guided hyperventilation
that helps somehow.

In Chinese medicine, grief is processed
through the lungs. Years later,
hear more clearly

how his mother whispered in your ear
Thank you for all you did for him
when you hugged her.

A friend who was into integrative medicine suggested I try a process called Transformational Breathing to help dissolve the long-held grief, not just for this one patient, but for many. My attitude toward alternative medicine is largely a pragmatic one. I’m willing to investigate the ones that do no harm.

While I’m sure I don’t fully understand the philosophies behind the doshas of Ayurvedic medicine, or the energy meridians used in acupuncture and Chinese medicine, these models are sometimes useful ways of looking at the world. Chinese medicine practitioners say that grief is processed through the lungs.

Transformational Breathing turned out to be guided, intentional hyperventilation. It was an unusual way of altering consciousness, to be sure, but safer than many others I could have tried. The point is, I felt the process to be immensely helpful.

The tool I’ve always returned to though, is poetry. That stuffed-down grief and anger need to be processed eventually. When an image drifts up as I’m writing, I turn it into a poem.