Hi, I'm Henry Bear.

And I'm Tyler Johnson.

And you're listening to The Doctor's Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine.

Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered.

What makes medicine meaningful?

Can a stronger understanding of this meaning

create better doctors?

How can we build health care institutions

that nurture the doctor-patient connection?

What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of suffering?

In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across health care, from doctors and nurses to patients and health care executives, those who have collected a career's worth of hard-earned wisdom.

Probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine, we will hear stories that are by turns heart-breaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging, and enlightening.

We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do.

Join us as we think out loud about what illness and healing can teach us about some of life's biggest questions.

In 1969, Elizabeth Kubler Ross identified the five stages of dying in her book on death and dying. Her work has radically transformed the way we think and talk about grief and loss, giving us a shared vocabulary and understanding of a previously murky yet universal human experience.

Towards the end of her life, Kubler Ross worked closely and authored several books with David Kessler,

who today is a world's foremost expert on grief.

David has taught health care workers, counselors, and first responders on confronting the end of life

and reached millions of people through his writings and his website grief.com.

In his 2019 book Finding Meaning, David introduced a sixth stage of grief, meaning.

In this episode, David joins us to share what his personal experiences with loss and how his decades of work helping people on the edge of life and death have taught him about finding meaning amid suffering and happiness after tragedy. David, welcome to the show and thanks for being here.

I'm so glad to be with you. Thank you both for doing this. So David, you are often referred to as a modern day fanatologist. Now that's not really a word that we hear often. So can you tell us what that means and what some of the big picture issues you address are?

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