When helping others brings healing
Meeting with parents who have lost a young child to cancer is one of the most difficult tasks carried out by Dana-Farber's pastoral care team. When Rabbi David Paskin pays such visits, he makes sure to focus solely on each family's "journey"—even though he has taken that same voyage himself.
Rabbi David Paskin draws inspiration from his late daughter, Liat.
Paskin's daughter, Liat, was a DFCI patient who died of a brain tumor at the age of 21 months in April 2002, just six weeks before his rabbinical ordination. Moved by the "exceptional care" his daughter and family received during Liat's treatment at the Institute and partnering Children's Hospital Boston, Paskin joined Dana-Farber as its on-call rabbi the following January.
The Jewish spiritual leader has spent most of his Mondays since then with pediatric and adult patients, and he comforts families at their homes and officiates at funerals when needed. Listening as others share their hopes and fears about cancer, he draws on his own experiences but resists urges to over-empathize.
"I want to share my story and will do so if asked, but I feel very strongly that they deserve to focus on their own experience," says Paskin, who also leads Temple Beth Abraham in Canton, Mass. "Even if I were talking to another rabbi with a young daughter who died of a brain tumor, I would still have no idea what he or she was going through. Cancer is a very personal journey, and my goal is to help people in their travels, wherever they may take them."
His association with Dana-Farber has aided in his own healing, Paskin explains, by helping him "learn to see beauty, even in the dying process." An accomplished musician whose band, Shirav, has released several albums — including one dedicated to his daughter's memory—he also started the Liat Chanina Foundation to raise money for research into pediatric brain tumors at DFCI and elsewhere. And although the Institute holds some painful memories, he says ,"I can't imagine not being here."
"When you or a loved one is sick, you are completely consumed by the illness and all of the treatments," he reflects ."The goal should not be to get over your pain or loss, but to weave this experience into your life and live and grow through it. I think healing in a spiritual sense is finding wholeness even within illness."
