Afraid? Sometimes, It Looks Like Bravery

Grieving as a radical act

It’s uncommon to make new, bone deep friends as an adult. Meeting Laurel Braitman in 2015 was the unexpected beginning of an outrageous, deep platonic love sort of friendship that feels nothing short of magical. When you are in Laurel’s orbit she is the most interesting person in a room, but she thinks you are the most interesting person in the room, and you get a ride on a merry-go-round of getting-to-know-you-even-better until one of you really does need to go to your next meeting.

Around the time we met, Laurel started to write her new book - What Looks Like Bravery - which is as much about grief and loss as it is about doctors and our shared brand of tender toughness. I cannot wait for you to read this beautiful, big hearted book about loss and love. A little known perk of being dear friends with an author is you get to read their books early and tell everyone about them.

A Child & A Dying Cardiac Surgeon

When Laurel was young, her father, a cardiac surgeon and avocado rancher, developed terminal cancer. He and her mom traveled the country for experimental therapies and surgeries hoping to extend his life as long as possible, to raise his kids. Laurel’s young life revolved around the normalization of fighting illness, and the ever present knowledge that her dad would be taken one day with enough warning to worry, but not enough warning to be ready.

Laurel explores the immense grief of parental loss and how the catastrophic shift can mold an adult life. Just like real life, her observations capture the charming and funny moments of a flesh and blood family living with and in the aftermath of serious illness.

She unravels a sweater of grief and somehow knits it back into something a little unconventional, but much cosier.

Laurel Braitman at the ranch, in a cowboy hat and blue/white striped shirt and black vest, holding her new memoir, What Looks Like Bravery.

It’s impossible to read about Laurel’s physician father without thinking about my own mortality, my kids, and my own relationship with grief - shaped by medical training and hospitals.

When Laurel started teaching writing in the Stanford medical school, she could see her dad in people like me - medical students and physicians:

“The medical school was a magnet for overachievers, a whole institution of people who believed in excellence as an analgesic. I wanted to help them tell their own stories because,

in a field in which vulnerability can be punished, being yourself is a radical act.”

She sees the impact of our training and medical culture. She sees how we have been conditioned to worry about others, rather than ourselves. How we pretend our bodies won’t fail. How we hide our feelings behind confidence. How we research our own symptoms and treat our friends. How we intellectualize everything, hoping to exert control in uncontrollable circumstances.

And she sees the radical act of vulnerability as a physician. It requires peeling back the layers of protection we have erected against the pain of death. Vulnerability requires us to stop soothing ourselves with our over-intellectualization and the false sense of control.

Grief & Palliative Care

Reading the book as a physician and ethicist, I hope readers will see the critical importance of palliative care for dying people and grief processing for those left behind. Laurel’s journey in unpacking her childhood trauma serves can teach us how to heal our wounds at any age.

While working in a unique grief program for kids, Laurel asks:

“How do I do this? Help kids die, help adults grieve, sit here and hold all the hardest things that happen in people’s lives.”

I ask myself similar questions most days - whether caring for kids with life-limiting diseases or helping parents navigate complicated treatment decisions where there are no promises of a cure. I especially struggle with the fact that there is rarely a “right way” or a “best way” to be with people who are in the midst of immense life-altering suffering. Tragedy and pain are around every corner, but we have to leave room for meaning-making, joy, and tenderness.

What Looks Like Bravery

I texted Laurel a few weeks ago, still wiping tears from my cheeks, my advance copy paperback on my lap: “You did it, Laurel. Your dad would be so proud.” As a doctor, as a parent, and as Laurel’s friend, I know this in my marrow.

This triumphant memoir captures the spirit of a full life, even if the life is shorter than it should have been.

I can’t recommend What Looks Like Bravery enough — you can find it here. It’s everywhere on Tuesday, March 14th.

You can follow Laurel on Instagram here, read her Substack

Dark Horse

, and find her website here. Writing workshops for healthcare workers are here.