What Matters Most

Dawn Gross really wants to talk to you about death—but she’s far from morbid. “As you start to have these conversations,” she said, “you realize that even if it’s in the context of imagining the end of life and how to support someone who’s dying, what you’re actually talking about is what matters most to a person while they are very much alive.” Though it’s hard to envision Gross, M96, SK96, a soulful Bay Area-based palliative care and hospice physician, doing anything else, she studied neuroscience and psychology as an undergrad and entered the Tufts MD/PhD program in the early 1990s, expecting to emerge a brain surgeon. (She even had a license plate that read BRNMD2B, or “Brain M.D. to be.”) Switching to immunology, Gross was the sole student researcher on a breakthrough that identified the precise cause of an autoimmune reaction in the arthritic joints of patients with Lyme disease.

Yet her experiences caring for hematology and bone-marrow transplant patients during an internship year at Tufts Medical Center and a fellowship at Stanford University—coupled with a period of intense reflection following her father’s death—led her to ponder big questions, and ultimately to her current career. Today the mother of three is an attending physician in the University of California San Francisco’s Division of Palliative Medicine and host of the KALW radio show “Dying to Talk,” on which she and expert guests grapple with the nuances of end-of-life conversations. On her campaign to encourage people to have these discussions early and often, Gross is writing a book and is co-creator of Death Ed, a high school course on the subject. Ahead, she talks about listening deeply, how doctors can stay attuned to patients’ wishes, and the power of magic wands.

Read more in the Summer 2018 issue of Tufts Medicine.