On Informing Families a Child has Died

I am sharing a moving piece by Naomi Rosenberg, an emergency room doctor at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, about telling a mother her child has died. It is hauntingly familiar; over the past 20 years as a pediatric emergency medicine physician, I have followed a sequence similar to the steps she describes in her piece. It is the hardest part of the job, as it should be. It never gets easier–this, too, is as it should be. I am thankful that few others among my friends and family have outlived their own child.