Tatiana: A Profile in Courage

I have always admired the Kennedys. Despite their many human flaws I have always been keenly interested in our American royalty, the Kennedy’s. I remember the day I heard President Kennedy was shot, Jackie’s pink suit, LBJ taking over. The funeral with three year old John John’s salute. I remember watching Teddy’s funeral from the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. I remember hearing of John’s and his wife and sister in law’s death the first day of a beautiful vacation in Napa and not being able to get out of bed for several hours I was so distraught.. I remember the thrill of just by chance sitting behind Jackie, Carolyn and John at the Harvard graduation one year when I worked for Harvard. I have always admired Carolyn’s resilience and her ability to serve as Ambassador to Japan and Australia after facing so much trauma in her life. As a charming aside I had a close friend in Connecticut who belonged to the same country club as Edwin Schlossberg’s parents. They said Carolyn went up to the same delicious salad bar as everyone else, modestly dressed, while everyone tried to make believe they didn’t know who she was. And, Edwin Schlossberg’s parents, who survived the Holocaust, came to pay a shiva call when my friend’s father died.

When I began reading Tatiana’s writings in the NY Times, I immediately knew who she was. I wondered if she was named after someone who perished in the Holocaust or another Eastern European relative. I noticed she had stopped writing for the Times about a year ago and missed her excellent journalism. I told myself she was busy with other things. Of course I had read all about her marriage and first child.

When I heard about the article in the New Yorker and her fate I was totally devastated. I agreed with her cousin Maria Shriver that there was no way possible to make sense of this and cried when I heard repeatedly that she always tried to be good – a good student, daughter, wife, mother, especially to try to spare her mother more suffering. And now she was powerless. I empathized with her wish spare her mother any more additional pain. 

The only book I have ever read that can be helpful in a situation like this is When Bad Things Happen To Good People by Rabbi Harold Kushner.
I love that Tatiana’s husband said that one of the most powerful ways to keep her memory alive was through laughter, and that he and both of her parents slept on hospital floors for a year so that she didn’t have to be alone with all the chemo, two bone marrow transplants and several experimental treatments.

I think that there is a lot that both patients and clinicians can learn from this horror.

There are almost no courses offered in graduate school or continuing education classes about patients who have lost mothers through death in the first three years of life. By age four, most people have developed some memory and that becomes a totally different experience. Death is its own unique, profound experience. This is inexcusable in the United Sates which had its own inexcusably high rate of infant and maternal mortality. How well I remember the upper middle class woman I worked with who was about 3 years old when her mother died a few hours after giving birth to her sister; she could never understand the reasons. She talked about how her new stepmother couldn’t have been nicer and tried hard, but she always knew and felt she wasn’t her mother. She talked often about how in her 40 ‘s when she was working, even an hour from her birthplace, that people would stare at her and whisper that she was the woman whose mother died in childbirth. Very few people were willing to talk to her about her mother’s death other than her grandparents, her mother’s parents, who were clearly broken by the experience.

Many of our patients with eating disorders and other addictions such as shopping, alcoholism, drugs, and/or gambling speak often about the emptiness, boredom, aloneness behind their substance use. (Is there anyone in this culture without at least one addiction?)

One way of healing that emptiness is connection with others. As Tatiana’s grandfather, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what my country can do for me, ask what I can do for my country.” Perhaps, in those empty hours, people could consider planning a fundraiser, even if it only has 5 or 10 of their friends to begin with to raise even a small amount of money for leukemia, ALS, Parkinson’s research. Maybe they can begin volunteering at a hospital or home care program for one of the many other “Tatiana’s” who are struggling alone without the support she was lucky to have. Perhaps they can begin working for candidates who want to increase research money for disease and health care access for all. 

Perhaps the patients who struggle with emptiness can follow the advice of all of the current rehabs and think of three things, no matter how trite or how small: to be grateful to that day. Perhaps they can go to a 12 step meeting where service is always emphasized. As a wise poster I read said, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” Perhaps we can all think about how to be a little bit more like Caroline Kennedy, the definition of Resilience as she carried Tatiana’s one year old baby out of the funeral.