As medical students, we know of death. We study anatomy through cadaver lab, we memorize mortality rates of diseases, and we hear stories from our professors about their late patients. But most of us do not know death yet.

Carlin E. Zaprowski reflects on the difficulty of losing patients and encourages supervisors to discuss this difficulty with trainees.

The essay read in this episode was published in the Teaching and Learning Moments column in the January 2024 issue of Academic Medicine. Read the essay at academicmedicine.org.