“Dr. Dale, I read an article you wrote,” he said.
I was taken aback. A long-standing, favorite patient of mine, an older African American man from Chicago’s south side with HIV and prostate cancer, was claiming to have found the time and inclination to dig up, and read, one of my papers? Really? Why?
The author with a young oak tree he planted in his father's memory.“Are you sure? What was it about?” I asked, trying not to sound skeptical.
“It was a biography. About you and your Dad. I found it in a magazine in the hospital,” he offered.
I smiled. Now I understood. He had read an article I wrote about my father’s death from lung cancer, published in an in-house magazine for University of Chicago alumni that is often found in the hospital. I was amazed, impressed, and touched.
“What’d you think?” I asked, a little worried.
“It was great! I loved it!” he replied. “I made my wife read it. She loved it, too. She thinks you’re ‘The Man’.”
I was flabbergasted--and as proud of that article as any I have published in the peer-reviewed literature.
The Importance of Personal Writing
As I wove through Chicago traffic heading to work over one year ago, on a Wednesday morning, a hospice nurse in Springfield, IL, called to tell me my father was actively dying from lung cancer; he had less than 2 hours to live. The prior weekend, I had missed my usual visit to see him because I was hosting a national conference on, of all topics, improving cancer research for older adults. In fulfilling my professional aspirations to make the world a better place for older adults with cancer, I missed my final opportunity to see my father alive before cancer claimed his life.
Following Dad’s death, I was inspired by colleagues to step outside my usual professional boundaries, publishing three personal essays about my father. The first was his obituary, the second was a personal response to his death for an internal University of Chicago alumni publication, Medicine on the Midway, and the third was a personal reflection for a professional journal, the Journal of Geriatric Oncology. Then the Hartford Foundation kindly encouraged me to write a blog for Health AGEnda. While done primarily for personal reasons, mostly to work through my own raw feelings, each led to surprising, overwhelmingly positive, reactions from others. In many respects, it is the most influential writing I’ve done, if you consider the number, strength, and persistence of the spontaneous responses I’ve received, and continue to receive, over the ensuing year.
This unexpected response from often unknown others, so different from any other writing I’ve done professionally, suggested to me that other medical professionals might like to try more personal writing. What better way to share the importance of geriatric medicine with a much wider audience? In hopes of inspiring my colleagues, as others inspired me, I offer the following encouragement.
1. It’s intimidating, but worth it. While it is emotionally revealing, and frankly frightening, personal writing can be even more rewarding than academic writing. It is important to be completely honest--not about “data” like in a paper, but about inner self. Don’t censor yourself, especially during that crucial first draft. All the internal conflicts and personal failings that we typically struggle to hide at work can be appropriately unleashed in personal essays. For example, I admitted the helpless, bewildering feeling of having the hospice nurse tell me my father would die before I could get home that fateful Wednesday morning. I revealed the long-standing conflicts I’d had with my father over the years and the deeply wounding continuation of many of those conflicts until the end. More positively, I admitted to kissing my father on his forehead, something he would not have permitted when alive. All of these things, and more, made the writing raw, difficult, and upsetting. Revealing that, despite my extensive training in geriatrics and oncology, I was no better at being a supportive son than my patients was embarrassing. But it was also, in the end, cathartic. Even more importantly, many others identified with my struggles, and some even thanked me for expressing their own feelings.
One more piece of advice: get a good editor and allow her to do her job—even if it is more upsetting than the writing itself! Your honesty is important, but not always appropriate; editors help you find the right balance.
2. The response from others is inspiring. Unlike with other, non-personal, writing, people seem compelled to comment. To my genuine shock, there was an entire audience out there for this. A student editor e-mailed to say, “I just finished editing our next issue, and I had to write to you. After reading your piece, I had to shut my office door to cry. Thanks.” I hardly knew how to respond. People I hadn’t heard from in years found the article and contacted me out of the blue. Recently, a woman writing a book on “lessons learned from a father’s death” asked to include one of the pieces in her book. All of these personal responses, from colleagues, friends, patients, and complete strangers from all walks of life, revealed a new audience for my writing, a more personal one that I hadn’t known existed. Writing for the Health AGEnda blog was another unexpected and pleasant result, which has helped open the whole new world of social media to me. I now boldly Twitter to my growing list of followers (@WilliamDale_MD).
3. You can help the public realize the importance of improving health care for older adults. Don’t worry that personal writing is “wasting your valuable time.” It is not just an indulgence that takes away from your scholarly writing; it should be considered part of your writing portfolio. There are almost certainly others out there who will be receptive, find meaning in it for their own lives, and better appreciate your other work. I was able to turn these “hidden” revelations, so relevant for my own clinical care and research in cancer and aging, into a source of inspiration not only for myself, but for others.
There are many outlets for sharing your personal writing. There is an on-line, social-networking site for academics where I make my articles publicly available. Unlike PubMed, it allows me to post anything I consider important, and I’ve included the articles about my father there, alongside my other publications. These articles on my father’s death receive the most attention, and I believe that several of those who find them are curious enough to at least look at my other work. This is another way this more personal writing can enhance your professional work.
By showing people--through compelling, personal stories, rather than merely reporting research results--the experiences of real older people and their families with our often dysfunctional health care system, we can help the public understand the importance of building a better system to care for older Americans. Personal stories work through the compelling lens of emotions, helping illustrate how individual lives are shaped by the current system, and connecting us to others. Memorable stories are more easily recalled than dry statistics, making it easier for people to recall an argument and describe it for others. It helps humanize the issues we struggle with every day, helping others understand the challenges we face. While these stories cannot replace the hard work we do every day to improve the system, they help capture the essence of why we work so hard. Even better: my patients actually read them.
This past fall, in memory of his father, William Dale established the Dale Schempp Memorial Fund for Geriatric-Oncology Research. For more information about the fund, please contact Bradford Lane at (773) 834-6539 or e-mail blane@medicine.bsd.uchicago.edu.
For reprints of either “My Father’s Life with Cancer”, Medicine on the Midway, Spring 2011 or “Personal Reflections on Geriatric Oncology,” Journal of Geriatric Oncology 2 (2): 147-148 (April 2011), please contact Dr. Dale at wdale@medicine.bsd.uchicago.edu.