Jennifer a O'Brien

As a Palliative Care and Hospice physician, my husband Bob was used to bad news. For years he had been part of an interdisciplinary healthcare team that provided the medical and supportive care, social service resources, and spiritual guidance necessary for individuals and families living with and dying of serious illness.

I had plenty of my own familiarity with serious conditions and death. My only sibling, David, died after three weeks in a coma when I was 18. My mother died of pancreatic cancer 20 years later. I had cared for uncles, grandparents and friends at end of life. When Bob described “Precious Time” to his patients and their families, I knew from my own experience that he was giving a name to the period of relationship when death is within sight. Precious Time is when nearly every moment is filled with the potential of a peaceful, comforting memory or a remorseful, regretful one for the surviving ones who will go on after the death.

Now it was ours, Bob had been diagnosed with a stage IV, metastatic cancer. The same Jennifer O’Brien and Robert Lehmberg, MD who had fallen in love and wed in the courtyard at the Winfred P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, where Bob worked were facing our own bad news and our own Precious Time. Bob and I together would be the entire DIY interdisciplinary, palliative care team. And I alone would manage my own potential for peace or regret after Bob’s death.