Editor’s note: Hui-wen Sato is a pediatric ICU nurse in California and a regular writer for this blog who has gone deeply into the topic of grief, her own and that of patients and their families. Her insights reverse our usual ways of understanding grief, finding a generative energy instead of a wasteland. Here is a key passage from a TED-style talk (see video below) she gave at the last End Well Project conference in November 2023. End Well is “a nonprofit on a mission to transform how the world thinks about, talks about, and plans for the end of life.”

“And so I realized that what I was going to need to learn how to do was not compartmentalize, but integrate all of my experiences into all of who I am. And as I started to learn how to integrate all of my experiences, there came a curious relief and freedom with this integration. Because I no longer had to pretend that I didn’t grieve for my patients. I could just grieve. And I could then get in closer and actually learn more about who they were, who their families were, and I could start to provide a kind of care I think I perhaps had always wanted to provide, but perhaps was a little too scared to get close enough to learn how.”