Hey, it's Anna. I want to let you know that this week's episode deals with the sudden death of a young child. Please take care while listening.

I don't know what I believe about like the bigger picture, but I've now thought about like, wow, did I land in this career because I needed this for my own journey, my own healing.

I don't know. There's something that seems true about that.

This is Death, Sex, and Money. The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot. I need to talk about more. I'm Anna Sale.

After Dr. Bonnie Chen's son died last year, it changed the way she talked to her own patients about death. She's more tentative in her approach now.

She wants to communicate about end of life in ways that a patient is ready to hear.

So there are many visits where I don't use the word death at all. And I find now that I really do feel my role is to walk alongside someone in their serious illness and sometimes denial is a beautiful coping mechanism.

Bonnie is in her 40s and lives in Oakland, California. Most of her conversations with patients revolve around death somehow because she's a palliative care specialist.

She's brought in to help patients manage serious, often untreatable illness when it's more about comfort than a cure.

There's something about being able to be with people when they're getting hard news or when they're trying to figure out what's next or at sea patients communicate with their families and then trying to love each other they best they can in the worst situation.

It's like you get this window into people's lives that of course you would never have otherwise and it's a different kind of satisfaction than being able to fix someone or cure someone.

Bonnie has been a palliative care doctor for 10 years, mostly working with patients who are dealing with terminal cancer, something Bonnie's mom died from when Bonnie was 17.

I think the unspoken message I took in as a teenager was that mom is sick, keep your head down, try and get your aides, don't cause a fuss. And in retrospect,

feeling how hard it is for me to remember my emotions from those times, I think there was some subconscious part of me that knew that palliative care fills that void for my teenage self.

I want to talk to you now about your son's death. Yeah, he died suddenly in an accident when he was 16 months old. That's right.

And this was about a year ago. So I just want to go slow here when I when I just said that what happened in your body today.

I still feel a shudder kind of move through me, like, oh, like those are facts that anages stated and like, you know, like cannot really be the reality of things that's so horrifying.

And then like, kind of a active relaxing into, yeah, yeah, that's true.

The spring after her son, Benji died. Bonnie wrote an essay in the San Francisco Chronicle, where she has reading more of it.

I experienced life on the other side of the exam table in horrid slow motion, Technicolor. I sat on the other end of a 911 call. I wrote in the ambulance as a caregiver, not a first responder.

I waited outside the emergency room as I heard the doctor call out for vital signs and medications, and most telling late to my ears, a social worker.

I experienced the silence after the gloves came off and the team walked wearily out of the room. This time, I was the one to wail.

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