Grief for a Departed Mentor

   January 14, 2008, Judah Folkman died today.

I was going to see him on March 14th. I was going to show him the book I had written. Chapter four was about him. About how he had inspired me to become a better surgeon and a more caring physician.

But he was gone. Judah Folkman, next to my grandfather, was the finest man I ever met. He was a legend in the field of Surgery. He had been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. He was famous, renowned. But I remembered him as the most inspiring, intimate, and gracious teacher I ever met. Even when I was a lowly medical student, Dr. Folkman made me feel as if I were the only human being he cared about teaching, even though there were hundreds of doctors he taught every day.

While I was a medical student and a resident at Harvard Medical School system, I attended every lecture he gave; each was a gem. Once—just once, when I was away on a job interview and I missed his lecture, entitled “How to Survive Residency.” I was about to become a surgical resident. How could I have missed that one? I asked one of my classmates if he had taken any notes. He showed me a page and a half of scribble. “This…this is all you wrote down during a two hour lecture by Dr. Folkman?” I asked. “This

I had no choice. I would have to call Dr. Folkman’s office and find out if he might have any written notes I could photocopy. His secretary was suspicious about my intentions. “Why do you need these notes?” I patiently explained. Finally, she relented and told me to come into Dr. Folkman’s office at Boston Children’s’ Hospital. In the meantime, she would see what she could do about getting me notes.

When I got to the office, she motioned to me to wait in the anteroom. I waited about five minutes and then she told me to go in to see Dr. Folkman.

“What?’ I stammered. “No. I just wanted the notes. That’s all. It’s no big deal—“
“He said he won’t give them to you until he’s talked with you,” she said.
So, unnerved, I walked into his office. There he was. His glasses halfway down his beaked nose. Smiling. Welcoming. He stood up, walking around the desk to greet me—a fourth year medical student.
        

“So what’s this about your wanting my notes?”
I explained everything. How I had attended very lecture. He stopped me.
         “What was the title of the lecture I gave at the Cancer Center two months ago?” he demanded.
         “How to deal with children diagnosed with cancer.”
         “And what about the lecture gave in the Bigelow Amphitheater last year?”
         “Peritonitis and the six walls of the abdominal cavity,” I answered.
         Every single one of them I remembered without a moment’s hesitation. He smiled.
         “Okay. I believe you. You listened. Sit down,” he said.
        

Dr. Folkman then proceeded to give a personal, one-on-one lecture for two hours about surviving residency, how to organize each disease, how to make the most of every operation. He took out his very own notebooks from his residency years at the Massachusetts General Hospital (where ultimately I would also be a resident) and showed me where, as an intern, he had made detailed, penciled drawings of every seemingly minor detail. About how to lay out the surgical drapes for an appendectomy. How to place the retractors for the operative exposure for an indirect inguinal hernia. He gave me everything he had that day. He held nothing back. And he did that every day. For dozens upon dozens of people. And that day, sitting as his only student, his only disciple, I felt like I had been blessed, chosen, touched by his presence in ways he may never know. But I know Judah Folkman is alive in my heart as long as it beats.
        

Today, on January 14, 2008, Dr. Folkman collapsed in the Denver International Airport, en route from Boston to Vancouver to give a lecture at a medical conference there. He died of an apparent heart attack. I sobbed thinking of this great, wonderful, and beautiful man dying in a strange airport. I wanted to be with him. To hold him. To embrace him. To tell him how much he had changed my life. How he had inspired me. How much I loved him.
        

After my wife broke the news to me about Dr. Folkman, I cried in my bedroom. That whole night the Internet crackled with blogs, conversations, and testimonials from hundreds of doctors he had touched, inspired, and mentored. Dr. Folkman was a deeply religious man and I thought if ever the angels of Heaven found reason to come down to the Denver International Airport, it would be to escort a soul like Judah Folkman up to Paradise. I know my life would never have been the same without him. I thought: how do people take the measure of a man as great, as humble, as kind as Judah Folkman? It’s beyond measure, I suspect. Maybe, it is like seeing God’s own love directly. That a human being can change everyone he touches. Change the very world we all live in. For me, I am blessed to have known him, to have been touched by him. I hope that others like him will appear in the midst of every generation—to guide them, to support them, and to inspire them.