About my signature program

Maternl arises from my work with families who experienced the tragic loss of a pregnancy or newborn and is founded on a model of care I have practiced throughout my career; the use of language to help the grieving and healing process: words we write, words we read, and words we say and hear to serve as an invaluable source of solace and hope.

I believe our words are songs from our hearts: "songs of hope and songs for hope.” I have written and continue to write words and thoughts in letters of condolence when my patients, family, friends and colleagues have experienced a pregnancy, newborn or infant loss- or a childhood / adult death-and includes a personalized, original poem which I either send to them and / or read at their memorial services / funerals. I have many years of experience doing this and the responses have been universally positive and “healing”. This has enabled me to foster deep and lasting relationships with them. I have been fortunate to have presented this work at local, national, and international meetings and symposiums and it is currently a core element in my lecture series to third-year medical students at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and prior, to the students and house staff at the Yale School of Medicine.

A signature feature of Maternl offers the opportunity:
     ▪ for families who have experienced these tragic losses to individually download a personalized poem dedicated to their child or their friend’s or family member’s child.
     ▪ for Physicians, Nurse-midwives, Nurse Practitioners and / or other Health Professionals to download an appropriate poem and to send to their patients as a personal, empathetic thought when their patients endure these losses.

I believe the impact of words and thoughts at these difficult times of loss are powerful and of universal need. I have written scores of poems but only include at this time first-lines of five poems each written for a particular but universally common reason for loss. Each poem addresses the universality of loss and the promise of hope. When a poem is selected, it is dedicated to and personalized with the child or parent’s name and signed by me as the author. It will be suitable for framing or to place in a “memory box” that many families have after their loss. It is available immediately in PDF format and can be printed or sent electronically. It is my hope that by sharing these poems at this very difficult time along with a brief personal note, a healing process can begin even when there is no “cure”. This program is available pro bono.




Prociedo Going forward (l)

Today are times of much despair
Yet times of great hope
To affirm our oath
As unfiltered reason and purpose
Rush in our blood
Every pulse a wave
Approaching distant shores
To leave our prejudice behind
To fade into vapors
As common as fog
And guide us to plant
Roots to bond our humanhood and
Vines to grow our brotherhood
As we go forth into tomorrow.



When patients may need us most

We are not parents without our children, and when our children, conceived through our love and nurtured through our bodies and our spirits, are lost to death, we remain parents forever. There is such remorse when a child dies, or a pregnancy fails. With each, a part of our own humanity is lost, never to be found.

I believe the care of a patient whose baby has died tests the very core of our “oath” and incorporates all that is vital in the role of a physician. Becoming involved and taking time from our busy day to provide bereavement care will self-serve not only our own need to grieve and assuage our inherent feelings of what our limitations as physicians are, but moreover, show our patients they can rely on us for sensitive, compassionate, and humanistic care, and that we will not abandon them at their most vulnerable moment.

Do not underestimate the influence of the words we read, write and speak for they are empowering. In a moment they can help; in less time they can hurt. A few simple words, prose or verse, in an appropriate situation can have inordinate influence on you and on others. 

We can all in our own way formulate an approach, which will permit us to provide our patients the greatest comfort and hope they require and should expect from us when they need us the most.




Sadness moistens my brow

"Sadness moistens my brow like mist, while silent tears coalesce upon my cheeks..”
An excerpt from my poem, The Mist
We who practice our honorable and privileged profession with an ethic to place our patients' care above all else; we understand the covenant of trust we must uphold, and know the importance of the confidentiality required to achieve this trust. We have taken the oath of Hippocrates -centuries old-containing this passage or similar words:

“And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets.."
(Hippocrates of Cos (1923). "The Oath". Loeb
Classical Library. 147: 298-299.)

We are sworn to uphold our patient's privacy enshrined in these words. How alarming that we now are forced by some laws to violate the inviolate oath we took. From where will come reason?

Yes,
" sadness moistens my brow.....



Solstice

A poem for those who might be mourning today.
The solstice of summer occurs today, June 21, and it is on this date that the sun at its extreme northern point appears to stand still.


The sun
staring upon me
has stopped
for one immeasurable moment,
a lone pause in an
infinite journey,
a slivered chasm in a
timeless wandering.
The sun
staring upon me
has stopped
to embrace
and welcome me traveler
to the borderless
boundaries of
Eternity.
The sun
staring upon me
has stopped
to comfort;
Its light transcends
the darkness of despondency,
Its warmth melts
the icy crust
of mourning.
The sun
staring upon me
has stopped
to deliver
a quarry
of hope out of hopelessness,
tranquility from turmoil...
...and peaceful dreaming
forever.




Yamim Noraim

A poem of ‘loving kindness’, promise and
life for all children of the world


Dream of golden notes
Floating in the silent night,
Of children’s breaths and heartbeats,
Simple passions of delight.
Scents of springtime blossoms
Dissolving in the air,
Pining for tranquility
For children everywhere.
With Fall now soon upon us
The ‘Days of Awe’ are here
With prayers that peace around the earth
Will come to them this year.
Pillars tall and pillars strong
Protecting dreams of fragile lives,
With canopies of silken hopes,
Woven threads, to live and thrive.
Guardians we, their sentinels,
Be their beacons kindling bright
Upon their dreams of golden notes
Floating in the silent night.

Yamim Noraim is Hebrew for the Days of Awe. “During this time, introspection takes place and … acts of loving kindness.”
© 2023 Michael R. Berman, M.D.



Alcyone

“...then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days!”
Walt Whitman

Let us wish to:
retreat from all unjust suffering,
banish afflictions, vaporize pain;
fashion peaceful harbors and orchards,
cultivate gardens, plant trees, harvest grain.
dream of lyres’ and harps’ splendid music,
watch beautiful children dance and be gay;
never see sadness and crying bear witness,
keep illness and sorrow far, far away.
abolish the hunger that threatens the fragile,
crave for vision and prescient wisdom;
nourish each other with love and kindness,
live with bountiful hope and compassion.
seek out always life’s streaming sunbeams,
dissolve each dark cloud in sunlight’s way;
entwine outstretched hands with one another...
…and turn all tomorrows to halcyon days.




The importance of our presence when our patients experience loss

There is a need to instill a sense of how important our influence and presence is to our patients when they experience their losses. As physicians, we must formulate an approach which will permit us to provide our patients the comfort and hope they require and should expect from us. I believe we must grasp and understand our own feelings to better serve our patients: we must serve our patients though both science and humanism. By becoming more introspective and more emotionally involved in what we are doing, our compassion will become evident and our patients will benefit. Technology indeed provides better diagnostic and therapeutic medical care, but as more technology is developed and utilized, health professionals may become more reliant on that technology and less on their interpersonal skills. They will have to learn –or relearn- and practice the traditional art of medicine, of listening and talking to patients, holding their hands, being at their bed side, while complementing the use of modern technology and advanced science. We as physicians must assure that the benefits of these technologies are fully realized but that their expanding sphere of influence does not disenfranchise the patient nor de-personalize the physician-patient relationship.



To my students: Embrace language

Do not underestimate the influence of the words you read, write and speak for they are empowering. In a moment they can help; in less time they can hurt. They can bring peace and they can create turmoil. A few simple words, prose or verse, in an appropriate situation can have inordinate influence on you and on others. And if we focus on those words of poetry, I ask that you savor them, for through verse and meter, free of inhibition and full of expression, a poet’s voice can articulate sensitivity, empathy and solemnity and provoke much needed introspection and inner peace.

Properly selected words can move the reader or listener to tears and awaken the primal emotions of joy, despair and hope. Hope becomes an essential thematic element in a poem for as human beings, we all have the capacity to bring hope to despair that is uniquely created by our humanity and our human conditions. The universe of poetry is an important sphere for you in your personal and professional lives. I suspect many of you have discovered this already. As a physician I have encountered elation, desperation, birth, life, death, happiness, sorrow, fulfillment, disappointment. Poetry has been and continues to be my refuge when my stethoscope, scalpel and pharmacopeia can no longer heal. Many years of caring for the wellbeing and the illnesses of patients and their families has taught me to accept that medical science in all its depth and possibilities is not precise and that the human mind and flesh are perishable. We are today steeped in myriad medical and scientific technologies that in themselves bring hope to previously hopeless conditions and pathologies. Yet there remains inexorable suffering and disappointment, which may accompany the failures and tribulations of all new technologies. Their benefits may not be realized. Thus, the paradox of new technologies to cure and cause pain is real and evident. Poetry enables us to ask why even when we already understand how. It permits us all, when witness to the frailties of our humanity, to abet healing and resolve through the very core of what makes us human, our language and our personal emotions.




The Physician and Patient

An essay on why those devoted to the health professions must look backwards to the “physicians of the Hippocratic era who called medicine 'The Art' for they knew that the care of their fellows was an act of creativity and recognized that each patient and his or her physician form a bond that is unique unto itself and that bond is the foundation upon which healing takes place." [Nuland in Parenthood lost]

I believe what must endure as the keystone to every healthcare disruption; every enterprise, existing and new, that claims a better way to provide the healthcare to our nation-and beyond, must be the physician aka health professional , and an inviolate bond with their patient must be established and respected. Inherent in what defines this physician-patient partnership is an unfaltering responsibility of the physician and an unconditional trust of the physician by the patient. Together these bonds the chasm between the always vulnerable patient and the knowledge and experience of the physician; a synergy of the need for care and the privilege of caring.

The embryo of trust begins at the first meeting between doctor and patient. This trust is nurtured over time but can, albeit with some challenges, be gained in an acute emergency or at a one-time office visit through the careful and deliberate use of appropriate words, body language, eye contact and an overt demonstration of ‘professionalism’. We must engage with every patient and strive to engender confidence, remembering and practicing our privilege to care and treat these “new” and mostly vulnerable patients that we meet in acute situations as we would for any other patient is paramount.

Trust can and must be attained but it takes effort and attention. When patients come to us for care, they are vulnerable, needy and often frightened. They are seeking professional, high quality and ‘human caring’. Making them feel comfortable, safe, hopeful and confident with our care, in our care, will begin the trust required for healing. Do not underestimate the influence of the words you read, write and speak for they are empowering. In a moment they can help; in less time they can hurt. They can bring peace and they can create turmoil. A few simple words, prose or verse, in an appropriate situation can have inordinate influence on you and on others. our human conditions.




Aoede

The first song on earth
was a child's cry,
ageless music of heart-sounds
and first-breath sighs
to immortalize
the promise of humankind,
and insist our hope…
for promised dreams
and sanguine visions,
for May-time baskets
of floral scents and sights,
for smiles upon our faces
in the springtime morning’s light,
for children when they dream again
and cry out golden notes
to float in silent nights,
for joys of breaths and heartbeats,
simple passions of delights,
for singing on winds diaphanous,
of the glory of the bloom.



Our privilege is sacred

I believes that we who have taken the "Oath" to practice our sacred profession of medicine and we who have committed ourselves to the healing arts must do so with the imperative to respect the sanctity of health for all those we treat - with a sense of high privilege-for they are the flesh and blood and souls of our humanity - past, present and future - and we, by our choice, their guardians. I, through my writings, poems, personal thoughts and unique programs strive to promote these tenets.




Even strangers from afar

Even strangers from afar know of you
and the aura of your birth,
the darkened hope and hue
of stormy clouds that shadow streaming light,
and know the flawless shards of love
disguised in tear drops crying day and night
one by one, gleaned tears from loving faces reach towards pinnacles of immortality
and makes us all believe
that as the flutter of heart beats breach
life itself, love too ascends, cast heavenly
upon rainbows and shooting stars,
our gifts to comfort for eternity.

And in the longer nights of winters liar,
your beauty can be seen by all
and in the frozen air where bellowed breaths of hope inspire.
Though today it lives, a chrysalis, laced
in grief and pain,
one day it will awaken
when winters snows spur springtime rain,
and fuse sadder thoughts with memories that distant smiles will bind
eternal love with hope and promise,
even strangers from afar can find.





To the Mark

“What grows never grows old.”
Noah benShea

I am greeted by a softness
Of this another day,
As my heart collects the
Perfumed scents of all my years
And at will reveals life’s passions
I have dreamed and dream and dream.

Though not alone
But with soul astride
These years within my flesh and frame
Sharing every beat my heart can thrust,
While gentle breaths unfold
Their whispered secrets never told;
The scents of youth now freed
To call the fervor of the muse,
To warm the rains that bathe
Some days in sheer delight.
Not yet travelling to the mark
To where withered petals fall
In a dark and ageless night.

To the mark
This journey goes alas
With my heart besides my soul,
And only when what I’ve loved lies cold,
When rains no longer warm
And thunders’ whine becomes a distant moan
Will I like petals in decay
Fall to the shadow of the ageless dark
And rest, forever, blinded to the pallor
Of my then to be vanquished heart.



A Poem for the New Year, 2024

Desiderium
(Latin: an ardent longing)

In this New Year …
Let us with all our hope
For all our days
Bare no malice, anger,
Prejudice or harm and
Promise a wish to extinguish
All searing conflagrations
Of our fellowman; their plights of war;
Their illnesses and their poverty,
Their homeless pain… and more.


Let us with all our hope
Abet others who be sicker or poorer,
Ailing from greater oppressions, and
Look beyond the facades of hypocrisy
And denial and un-roof the truths,
For it is here we may find our naked selves;
Minds and souls and physical beings of
A human birthright:
To live above darkened clouds of desolation;
To thrive in tranquility absent hatred and denunciation.




Amare

Forlorn, with tears
And cries, am I.
To lose you to your death
Without but even gasp or sigh,
Save a wisp of Angels breath;
The darkest sorrow
I have known.
Yet, your image burnt in my
Soul is my gift, my grace,
And always will I see your face
Upon the simmer of
Placid ponds
And in the clouds where
Sunbeams hide
And raindrops form,
And I will speak kind words
And write of you
And sing in sweet demure,
In early morning's dew
And in the crown of daffodils
Which bloom amidst the storms
Swept cross my brow,
In every dream
In which it seems
You come to me.
My love forever
Do I avow.



A letter I wrote which was published in the New York Times

Reference:
Abortion Opinion Leaves All Sides Uneasy Over Court Politicization
New York Times, May 4, 2022
Michael R Berman MD

In 1969 before abortion was legal in NYC I was a 4th year medical student on my Ob-Gyn rotation at Metropolitan Hospital. One of our responsibilities as “ student interns” was to participate in the care for the patients on the gynecology “septic service”; an entire floor of the hospital devoted to women in septic shock as a result of self-inflicted abortion attempts or from illegal abortions available “on the street.” Women with no other medical co-morbidities were dying each day with us at their bedside. These tragedies were preventable. When New York legalized abortion, the “septic services” disappeared. Abortion death rates dropped to near zero. Women in NYC and in other states after Roe v. Wade now had access to safe, legal abortions and post abortion care. Access to legal and safe abortion care must be preserved. Where access is denied and criminalized, hospitals will once again need to open their floors for “septic services” and women will once again unnecessarily die.