Dr. Sunita Puri was 5 years old when she first heard that life is temporary. Writing in the introduction of her book That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, Puri recalled how her father “patiently and thoroughly answered my questions about why the sunset burned a thousand bright colors, and why I could see the waning sun and the bright moon in the same sky.”
Five-year-old Puri wished the sky would always be that pretty. But, her father told her, “all of life is like the evening sky: beautiful, but temporary. Beautiful in part because it is temporary.”
The sky changes; one day, the houseplant in the living room would wither. One day, he told her, he would have gray hair and walk with a cane.
“The sooner you learn this lesson, he told me, the more you will value each moment in life,” Puri wrote, “knowing that is a temporary gift.”
Those were words that echoed in Puri’s mind two decades later, during medical school and her residency in internal medicine at the University of California San Francisco, and a fellowship in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at Stanford. Still, she found herself unprepared to face her patients’ mortality, and their suffering. Her job as a medical student was, after all, to preserve life.
“I began to believe that a longer life was a better life,” she wrote. “… We learned to rage against the dying of the light.”
At the time, palliative medicine was a relatively new specialty; now, however, Puri is a nationally recognized palliative medicine physician, who has served as medical director of the Palliative Medicine Program at the University of Southern California and the program director of the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts. This work, she wrote, is in the “borderland between life and death.” In that borderland, the language is one of talking around, “rather than about, suffering, dignity, living and dying.”
Puri’s memoir, That Good Night, was her attempt to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. In her career, Puri has grown passionate about the ways that the precise and compassionate use of language can empower patients and physicians to have the right conversations about living and dying and, in her personal life, about what it means to live and love well. It’s these considerations and conversations she’ll bring to the Week Seven Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “Wonder and Awe — Reverence as a Response to the World,” when she speaks at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy.
In just the past month, Puri’s writings have appeared in The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal; for the former, she wrote about the increasing cancer deaths among millennial patients. For the latter, Puri looked at new research showing a rise in home deaths and asked: Is that a good thing? Her hope, the incoming director of the Hospital-Based Palliative Medicine Service at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in That Good Night, is that writing and speaking about death, about what she’s learned from her patients over the years, “may free us all to acknowledge that a deeper understanding and embrace of our own mortality may actually revitalize how we live, and what we consider to be most meaningful in each of our brief lives.”
In Dylan Thomas’ poem, it’s wise men, good men, wild men, grave men — and the poet’s own father — who rage, who do not go gentle.
But human lives are “united by brevity and finitude, and the certainty of loss,” Puri wrote. “Just as we strive for dignity and purpose throughout of our lives, well before the light fades, we can bring this same dignity and purpose to our deaths, as we each journey into our own good night.”
