Stand By Me

By Allison J. Applebaum When I began my postdoctoral fellowship in Psycho-Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2010, I was working primarily with patients with advanced life limiting cancers. What was so striking to me about these patients’ narratives was that, as opposed to focusing on their own mortality, they were focused on their parents and partners and children and siblings and friends, the individuals left in the waiting rooms and left at homes. Individuals who they identified as the linchpin of their care, and who would be most deeply impacted by their eventual deaths.