About

As a Palliative Care and Hospice physician, my husband Bob was used to bad news. For years he had been part of an interdisciplinary healthcare team that provided the medical and supportive care, social service resources, and spiritual guidance necessary for individuals and families living with and dying of serious illness.

I had plenty of my own familiarity with serious conditions and death.  My only sibling, David, died after three weeks in a coma when I was 18.  My mother died of pancreatic cancer 20 years later. I had cared for uncles, grandparents and friends at end of life.  When Bob described “Precious Time” to his patients and their families, I knew from my own experience that he was giving a name to the period of relationship when death is within sight. Precious Time is when nearly every moment is filled with the potential of a peaceful, comforting memory or a remorseful, regretful one for the surviving ones who will go on after the death. 

Now it was ours, Bob had been diagnosed with a stage IV, metastatic cancer. The same Jennifer O’Brien and Robert Lehmberg, MD who had fallen in love and wed in the courtyard at the Winfred P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, where Bob worked were facing our own bad news and our own Precious Time. Bob and I together would be the entire DIY interdisciplinary, palliative care team. And I alone would manage my own potential for peace or regret after Bob’s death.

Bob lived for 22 months following his diagnosis.  During that time we experienced the hope for a cure, love and kindness of others, peace of acceptance, side effects of treatments, trappings of stress and fatigue, grieving of loss while preparing for his death and embracing our situation. 

I knew from my own experiences with loss and from our many dinner table conversations prior to Bob’s diagnosis, how caregivers and survivors must go on after the death of their loved one. We had discussed many times how people never forget the specific feelings and observations at the death of a loved one. 

There are no do-overs in end of life.

After Bob died, I documented our supporting, grieving, preparing, and embracing of Bob’s illness and death was well as my early widowhood using the layers of collages, tableaus and writings. You can read these in The Hospice Doctor’s Widow: A Journal.

If you are not currently a caregiver, you know someone who is.  You know someone who has a spouse, a parent, a sibling, or a friend with a life-limiting condition and is struggling to feel supported and whole while caring for and ultimately losing their loved one.  Caregivers are the ubiquitous, unsung heroes of our time, each of us is one, knows one or will soon become one. 

You know a caregiver who needs The Hospice Doctor’s Widow: A Journal. Who is it?  

PROFESSIONAL BIO

Jennifer O’Brien helps people talk about caregiving and end of life. She encourages compassionate, real conversation, planning and preparation.

After years of caring for people with serious illness as a physician, Jennifer’s husband, Bob Lehmberg, was diagnosed with a stage IV, metastatic cancer. But caregiving for the man who had made a 40-year career of caregiving as a physician was not easy. When Jennifer’s husband was diagnosed and later after he died, she turned to what had brought her comfort for years—art journaling. She documented and depicted the raw, honest, beautiful and exhausting reality of caregiving through collage, tableaus, notes and observations.  She included much of the wisdom and perspective she learned from her husband in his years as a physician. 

When the book was just a stack of pages, she took it to a friend who had just been diagnosed with a rare, advanced bladder cancer.  After reading the book and knowing his own prognosis, he said, “You need to give this to my wife. She needs to understand what is ahead and feel supported as my caregiver.”  After seeing how much that stack of pages helped them in his final months, Jennifer knew that what she had created might help others.

Having been a practice management consultant and educator to physicians for 35+ years, an executive administrator for two large medical practices, in administration at three major academic medical centers, the wife and now widow of a physician, Jennifer has a unique and thorough understanding of healthcare.  Still, with all of this experience, caregiving for her dying husband was both the greatest honor and challenge of her life. 

Now Jennifer works to help family caregivers feel supported while caring for others and taking care of themselves.