Telling Mom’s Patients She’d Passed Away

Posted by JewishMom on Nov 17, 2020 in Inspiration, Jewish Moms, Motherhood, My life | 15 comments

My mom, Gladys Arak Freedman, passed away last Thursday, but that didn’t stop the regular bombardment of phone calls, faxes and Emails for Dr. Arak throughout her shiva.
Many times a day the phone would ring as loud as an old mechanical alarm clock with incoming faxes or calls from patients. At first, before the funeral, I found this deeply irritating. “Mom died! LEAVE US ALONE!” and I would just let the answering machine pick up.
But then, I was appointed the unenviable task of returning those answering-machine messages, which meant telling my mom’s patients that she had passed away.
My mom hadn’t been your average psychiatrist. Unlike most psychiatrists, she accepted all kinds of insurance, even paperwork-heavy Medicaid. Low-income patients without even Medicaid would be seen for a symbolic fee or for nothing at all. Also, my mom had been a board-certified pediatrician before she became a psychiatrist, so she had additional medical knowledge that enabled her to help out those tough cases that other psychiatrists had been unable to crack.
And my mom remained devoted to those patients–in many cases, for decades. Until the very day of the stroke that led so quickly to her death last week, at the age of 77. And that hadn’t been an easy feat for mom, at all. My mom had suffered from MS since her mid-thirties. For decades, she had injected herself every day with medication to control the MS, but during her final years her health had declined steadily and sharply. Mom began to fall and injure herself frequently and was often in pain or very tired. My mom had been talking about closing her practice for several years. But the deadlines she set for closing-down came and went. My mom loved her patients dearly and she knew, for many of them, other psychiatrists wouldn’t be lining up around the block to treat them. And she just didn’t have the heart to do that . So (with, I found out last week, a great deal of help from my father, her remarkably devoted husband of 54 years, and a retired physician himself) she continued working.
So that’s how I ended up, profoundly emotionally and physically drained a few hours after the funeral, with a list of patients to call. The first patient I called had been coming to mom for over 20 years. He had already seen in the Baltimore Sun that mom had passed away, just hours after he’d sat in her office. With a choked voice, he told me: “Your mom helped me so much for so many years. I wanted to tell you and please tell your Dad that I’ve decided to sit shiva for her.”
Another patient with a Southern twang told me: “Me and my family’ve been coming to Dr. Arak since before they discovered dirt. She didn’t love me, I’ll tell ya, I was a bad boy. But if I’d try to pull one over on her she always caught me. I’d always say, ‘Can’t pull one over on Dr. Arak, she’s one sharp lady, don’t even try!’ Your mom was an excellent doctor and an excellent person.”
It’s unusual to hear grown men cry, but I grew used to it this week, as I spoke with mom’s patients, like the young man who responded to the sad news with: “No! You gotta be kidding me! No! No! No! No!,” and he went on like that for around a minute, until he finally said, “I want you to know your mom helped me more than, well, anyone helped me my entire life.”
And each patient I spoke with, I told the same thing, often over the sound of their crying “You think my mom helped you, but I want to tell you that you also helped her. My mom loved her patients so much. And you gave her a sense of purpose and put the spring in her step until the day she died.”
In the end, those conversations I’d dreaded so much became one of my deepest sources of comfort since mom died. But my mom’s patients didn’t only comfort me. They inspired me, filled me with deep yearning, that when I join my mom ((please God, may it be many, many years from now)) there will also be people who say, “No! No! No! She helped me SO much.”