Back in my Charlotte News (RIP) and Charlotte Observer days, I sat across a desk from a truly fantastic general assignment and police and cops reporter — a kind, soft-spoken ex-U.S. Marine.
Over and over, I heard him make difficult calls to people involved in tragedies, including the families of people who died in all kinds of accidents, crimes or acts of nature. This has to be one of the hardest jobs in journalism, for a reporter who needs information but doesn’t want to inflict emotional pain.
The goal, he once told me, was to avoid pushy questions about feelings and emotions. Instead, he tried to ask calm, factual questions they only a parent, spouse of sibling would know. The goal was not to waste their time or hurt them — but to find other voices (at specific institutions or networks of people) to interview. So he would ask if a young person had a favorite teacher or was active in a sports team or musical ensemble. Frequently, in Charlotte, he asked about friends and pastors at a religious congregation.
I thought of this reporter, and this issue, when reading a stunningly tragic New York Times coronavirus crisis story that ran with this headline: “Top E.R. Doctor Who Treated Virus Patients Dies by Suicide.” Let me stress that I want to praise this story, while also noting that — at a key moment — the Times team mentioned a strong religion angle, and then dropped the topic. First, here is some of the overture:
A top emergency room doctor at a Manhattan hospital that treated many coronavirus patients died by suicide on Sunday, her father and the police said.
Dr. Lorna M. Breen, the medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, died in Charlottesville, Va., where she was staying with family, her father said in an interview. …
Dr. Breen’s father, Dr. Philip C. Breen, said she had described devastating scenes of the toll the coronavirus took on patients.
“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” he said.
The elder Dr. Breen said his daughter had contracted the coronavirus but had gone back to work after recuperating for about a week and a half. The hospital sent her home again, before her family intervened to bring her to Charlottesville, he said.
Way down in the body of the story, there was this paragraph — which caught the eye of several members of the GetReligion team.
Aside from work, Dr. Breen filled her time with friends, hobbies and sports, friends said. She was an avid member of a New York ski club and traveled regularly out west to ski and snowboard. She was also a deeply religious Christian who volunteered at a home for older people once a week, friends said. Once a year, she threw a large party on the roof deck of her Manhattan home.
The phrase “deeply religious” implies that someone linked to this woman’s life, in an interview, mentioned a church connection as a significant element of her life. I doubt that angle would show up in a written document of some kind.
OK, I’ll ask: What was the name of her church or faith tradition?
She worked at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital. Was she by any chance part of a small mainline or large evangelical Presbyterian congregation? New York City has plenty of both, some of them internationally known — to the degree that they show up in the Times.
I raise this issue because the story does a good job of showing that Breen was a noble and even heroic figure — returning to her work after contracting the virus. She was known for her above-and-beyond service to others.
That’s the kind of characteristic that may or may not, in the eyes of her family and friends, have been linked to her life as a “deeply religious Christian.” How did this faith show up in the details of her life and schedule? Her public service as a volunteer to the elderly?
In other words, could this fact have led to a follow-up call or two? Did anyone ask about other people, a pastor perhaps, who could have addressed this part of her New York life?
This two passages jumped out at me:
Dr. Breen, 49, did not have a history of mental illness, her father said. But he said that when he last spoke with her, she seemed detached, and he could tell something was wrong. She had described to him an onslaught of patients who were dying before they could even be taken out of ambulances.
“She was truly in the trenches of the front line,” he said. He added: “Make sure she’s praised as a hero, because she was. She’s a casualty just as much as anyone else who has died.”
Also this:
Another colleague said that Dr. Breen was always looking out for others, making sure her doctors had protective equipment or whatever else they needed. Even when she was home recovering from Covid-19, she texted her co-workers to check in and see how they were doing, the colleague said.
Was this remarkable woman’s faith part of her work? Did she, to use religious language, have a “calling” as well as a “job”?
This was a strong story about a very personal tragedy. That quick reference to a religion angle — an angel, perhaps, rather than a religion ghost — left me wanting more.