I stood beside a very dear friend today and watched as he battled the brutality of the side effects of the drugs required to treat his illness. His body trembled with weakness and nausea, his face pale with exhaustion, but in his eyes, I caught the glint of his irrepressible spirit. It flickered like a stubborn flame in the wind, unwilling to be snuffed out. I saw his wife beside him, regal in her courage, stoic in her love, though I could almost feel the cracks forming deep within her. She stood straight, her hands steady, but I knew she was breaking inside.
Illness is never a solitary experience. It claims not only the body of the afflicted but also the hearts of all who stand near. I have seen it too many times to pretend otherwise. As a surgeon, I have stood in sterile theatres with the bright light overhead, cutting into human flesh with the hope of restoring life, only to sometimes leave it worse than before. I have walked out into waiting rooms carrying the unbearable weight of failure, my words heavy with the news that the outcome was not what we had hoped for. I have looked into the faces of mothers, husbands, daughters, who in that instant carried more suffering than their loved one in the hospital bed. The ravages of disease do not stop at the patient. They bleed outward.
Today, watching my friend, I was reminded again of how fragile the human body is and how strong the human spirit can be. He is fighting with everything he has, but it is not the fight of fists and teeth – it is the fight of endurance, of clinging to the smallest joys, of holding the hand of the woman he loves and giving her the gift of his presence even in his pain.
So often, I have witnessed this duel between diabolically unmatched contestants. On the one side, the disease. Aggressive, relentless, merciless, ravaging the marvel of creation that is the human body in unimaginably cruel and cunning ways with only one goal: to devastate, maim and kill. A system of purpose. On the other, the human body, overpowered but ever resourceful, defending and offering resistance, willed on by the instinct to survive. A riposte with meaning.
I have experienced this adversarial confrontation in far more personal ways. My father, one of the strongest, most remarkable men I ever knew, suffered a debilitating stroke that stole his body but spared his mind. It left him trapped, a brilliant mind caged in a shell that no longer obeyed him. To watch a man who once strode this firmament like a force of nature reduced to a chair, dependent, wasting away – that was its own cruelty.
And yet he did not bow. He remained proud, dignified, unbroken in spirit, though the monstrous constraints of his condition tried to strip him of everything he was. Those of us who loved him suffered too, in our own quiet ways. We remembered the man he had been – the booming laugh, the sharp wit, the iron will, the brilliant, analytical, incisive legal mind – and we saw the shadow that remained. But even that shadow was luminous, because he refused to let despair consume him. Over time, a kind of serenity settled on him, as if he had looked his fate in the eye and shaken its hand. He accepted it, but he never surrendered the core of himself.
And then came the day of his heart attack. In spite of the excellent expert care, I knew, in the instant I saw him in the Intensive Care Unit bed, the pallor of his skin making him almost invisible against the white background of the crip hospital linen, that there was no return. There was no further heroism to be brought. It was time…
I knew that he would not want to live tethered to machines, his dignity stripped away by a desperate grasp at prolongation. I looked at my colleagues who had been tasked with his management up to that point. They were contemporaries and medical school class mates, excellent physicians with decades of experience and we knew the answer without having to say a word. The surgeon in me made the cold, clinical decision. My siblings protested, voices thick with love and fear, but I bore the weight of that choice.
I decided to withdraw treatment. I switched off the machines myself.
For years afterward, I carried the unmentionable guilt which came with that decision. My darkest self whispered that I had killed my own father. The guilt and the loss of the man who had taught me how to live a full, honourable life of meaning by allowing me to watch him do so, reduced me to an empty, hollow vessel. I wept bitterly in the months that followed. I doubted myself, doubted my conviction, questioned whether I had been guided by duty or by cowardice, by mercy or by cruelty.
Yet thankfully, over time, the truth crystallized. I had not betrayed him. I had honoured him. I had given him the dignity he prized above all else. And now, if faced with the same choice again, I would not hesitate. I would choose for him the freedom he deserved, even if it broke me. And I realised that I hope my own children will do the same for me when my time comes, that they will be strong enough to let me go when my body is only a prison and my spirit is ready to be free.
It is easy, in medicine, to think that the role of a doctor is to save lives. But that is only half the truth. Sometimes the greatest act of healing is not to save a life, but to preserve a person’s humanity in the face of suffering. Sometimes it is to walk beside them, to witness their pain, to share in it, to say with our presence: You are not alone.
Standing beside my friend today
I felt the old ache rise again – the helplessness of watching someone I love endure what I cannot take from him. I thought of my patients over the years, of the families I have met in hospital corridors, faces hollowed by grief but lit with courage. I thought of my father, his unbowed spirit. And I realized again that suffering is not something that divides us. It is something that binds us.
We all suffer, in our own ways. We all will face illness, loss and death, whether in ourselves or in those we love. We cannot escape it. But in that inescapability lies our shared humanity. To see suffering is to be reminded of love, because it is only love that makes suffering bearable. My friend suffers, and I suffer watching him, because I love him. His wife suffers because she loves him. My siblings and I suffered with my father because we loved him. And in that suffering was proof of the depth of our bonds.
What I have learned, what years of medicine and life have taught me, is that suffering can strip away everything extraneous and leave only what is essential. It is in suffering that we see the truth of a person’s spirit. It is in suffering that courage is revealed, not in grand gestures, but in the quiet persistence of holding on one more day, one more hour.
I have seen the courage of patients who endured treatments that tore them apart, yet they smiled at their children. I have seen the courage of wives and husbands who sat vigil through endless nights, whispering words of comfort even when their own hearts were breaking. I have seen the courage of the dying, who, even as their bodies failed, sought to reassure the living that they would be alright.
I have also seen my own doubts, my own brokenness as a doctor and as a son. But I have also learned that to be human is to falter, to question, to suffer – and to rise again with empathy that is deeper because of the scars we carry.
Suffering, my own and that of others
It has carved me open, left me raw. But it has also given me empathy I would never otherwise have known. It has taught me to see not only the patient on the bed but the web of love that surrounds them, the family whose hearts are tethered to theirs. It has taught me to listen not only to symptoms but to silences, to hold space not only for cures but for grief.
When I look at my friend, I do not see only a man enduring illness. I see a man teaching me, again, what it means to fight, what it means to love, what it means to remain unbroken even in the face of pain. When I look at his wife, I see love that is not diminished by suffering but made more luminous because of it.
Eventually, we will all face the final letting go. We will all stand at the bedside of someone we love, or someone will stand at ours. And when that day comes, what will matter is not how long we fought but how deeply we loved, how fiercely we held on to our dignity, and how bravely we let go.
This is what suffering has taught me: that to witness another’s pain is not a burden but a privilege, because it means we are allowed into the deepest truth of what it means to be alive. That grief is the shadow of love. That dignity matters. That empathy is the only medicine that does not run out.
And so I stood beside my friend today. I held his hand. I looked into his eyes and saw the glint of his spirit, that stubborn flame that would not be extinguished. And I thought: this is the essence of being human – not the absence of suffering, but the courage to endure it, the love that sustains us through it, and the dignity that outlives even death.