Loss and Grief: Personal Stories of Doctors and Other Healthcare Professionals is a unique collection of personal narratives that chronicle the journeys of doctors and other healthcare professionals who have been personally impacted by life-altering losses. Edited by internationally recognized practitioners of supportive care medicine and grief counseling, these are unflinching, first-person narratives of authors walking in their own shoes. The narratives reveal losses of cherished loved ones, integrity, dreams, naïve views of colleagues, and the lack of institutional support for these inevitable experiences. Although the narrators are well-established leaders in their fields, serious loss brought each back to the exposed core of their most basic selves. They learned that the professional veneer was too thin to be instructive or protective. Readers might resonate with their own painful experiences and memories, and others might wonder how they will imagine their own future when these inevitable aspects of being human-loss and grief-strike them, too.
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Loss and Grief, it is our hope that such openly shared feelings of isolation and suffering will humanize the loss experience, ignite prospective discussions, and illuminate opportunities for education, research and interventions to prepare us for multiple loss experiences endemic to life.
Matthew Loscalzo, LCSW, APOS Fellow, is a founding Executive Director and Emeritus Professor of Supportive Care Medicine and Professor of Population Sciences at City of Hope. Professor Loscalzo was the President of the American Psychosocial Oncology Society and the Association of Oncology Social Workers, and he has held leadership positions at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Johns Hopkins Oncology Center, Eastern Virginia Medical School, and the Rebecca and John Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego. He has been a consultant to multiple major cancer organizations on how to build supportive care programs, implement new processes, and enhance staff engagement through his unique staff leadership model. His clinical interests and scholarly contributions are gender-based medicine, strengths-based approaches to psychotherapies, pain management, problem-based distress screening, and the creation of supportive care programs.
Marshall Forstein, MD, is a psychiatrist with more than forty years of experience. He is the co- founder of one of the first HIV Collaborative Care Clinics at the Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), a public-sector Harvard-affiliated teaching hospital. Dr. Forstein has been the Medical Director of Mental Health at the Fenway Health Center, one of the largest health centers dedicated to the LGBTQ+ communities. For nineteen years, he was the training director of the Psychiatry Residency Program at CHA, where he also served as Acting Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Vice Chair for Education and Training. He has been active on governmental and professional organization committees and task forces in the areas of HIV/AIDS and gender and sexuality, and he has written and taught nationally. He is currently on the teaching faculty at CHA/Harvard Medical School and maintains a private practice.
Linda A. Klein, JD, began her career as an attorney. She was selected to do a coveted federal clerkship for the Hon. Florence-Marie Cooper and worked with Fortune 500 companies at a prestigious law firm. At age 25, Ms. Klein, her father, and three siblings watched their 55-year-old mom die from breast cancer. They received no guidance around end-of-life care or what was to come after, never mind language to help each other heal. As a result, she changed careers. Ms. Klein was recruited by the Department of Supportive Care Medicine, City of Hope to oversee the Sheri & Les Biller Patient and Family Resource Center where she developed interdisciplinary programs focused on enhancing resiliency in cancer patients and their families. She led the Science of Caring Grand Rounds and assumed leadership in building the institution-wide advance care planning initiative. She currently leads bereavement support groups at Our House, one of the largest nonprofit grief centers in California.
