My Love, My Muse, and Her Call to Action: The Legacy of Amy Josephine Reed MD, PhD
I lost my beautiful wife on May 24, 2017.
On that day I held her hand and felt her pulse as her heart fibrillated to silence. I watched her vibrant skin turn pale as her heart stopped beating.
And I felt her spirit leave her body at 8:09 pm.
God give me strength!
After everyone left for the night, I covered her body with a blanket I’d given her for Christmas a few years back — and I laid next to her one last time. I listened to the soft rain on the roof she had built - until daylight came again. It felt like the blink of an eye, that night.
God help me!
I kissed her forehead, her lips, her lovely eyes, her soft hands, her chiseled nose — one last time.
It was cold. It resembled her — but the vessel was empty. It was 5:30 am on May 25th.
At 6 am, I opened the door to our home for the undertakers from the funeral home.
I escorted her to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania’s (HUP) morgue.
Our colleagues in the Department of Pathology performed an autopsy of her abdomen - as she had instructed me to request, for history’s sake.
The pathologist reported to me, professionally, with a gentle voice and teary eyes afterwards: her abdomen was filled with bloody “necrotic” tumor. The kidneys were blocked off — one appeared infected from the tumor blocking it. Bowel and tumor had become one.
I listened. The cause of her death was known to me.
It was catastrophic abdominal sarcomatosis, caused by her morcellation operation, that brought this horrific end— like so many other women’s for over twenty years. Spread by reckless gynecologists and a dangerous medical device irresponsibly marketed by companies like J&J and STORZ, this tumor filled Amy’s abdominal cavity and choked off her vital abdominal organs and vessels.
Amy had cancer. But a power morcellator used by a reckless gynecologist is what caused her catastrophic and premature death.
God give me the strength!
There are still gynecologists, leading ones, who argue that this spread of cancer by morcellation “makes it no worse” — that “it’s a bad disease anyway”.
They argue that Amy and the many hundreds of others like her are no worse off because their cancers are minced up and spread throughout their abdominal cavities by this dangerous practice. These are corrupted men and women, well decorated with MDs, with medical licenses and publications, trying to create the “alternative facts” that suit their professional investments and revenue stream. “Shame on you all — you are not doctors”.
God help me!
As we left HUP, it rained— as if God Himself was crying. Or maybe He was cleansing this dirty and corrupted earth we live on in the name of His daughter, Amy.
I don’t remember ever seeing a torrential downpour of that magnitude in Philadelphia, as I saw on the afternoon of May 25, 2017.
In the car, escorting Amy’s remains, it was raining so hard, I couldn’t hear my own voice. It was monsoon-like.
I dropped her body off at the Funeral Home to be embalmed in preparation for the catholic burial she had wanted. I left her in the basement of that funeral home. But it wasn’t her anymore. She was elsewhere.
Be still my beating heart. Cry not, Hooman.
Sharpen your sword — the battle is not over. The demon Amy fought is not dead.
On June 1st, a few days after what would have been our 16th wedding anniversary, our family laid her to rest. Her funeral mass was held at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia. She was buried at Newtown Cemetery in Newtown, PA.
Her coffin was draped in an American flag that had flown over the US capitol building specifically in her honor, at the request of United States congressman Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) — and his colleague Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY).
The flag was folded and delivered to our son, Joshua and me, by US Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick and US army Major Justin Rusk. She was honored with a three gun salute from the American Legion.
The little-minded and uninformed argued as to whether hers should be an American hero’s burial. Some publicly argued against it and some attempted to block it behind veils of ego and ignorance — “dying from cancer is not the same as dying on a battlefield”, they said….Indeed!
But the real warriors and public servants who witnessed what Amy had done, all know what had happened. They know exactly how she stood in defense of America’s public health and women’s health, on a battlefield as fierce as any fought with bullets and artillery. And now the history of our nation’s public health will be the judge.
It’s been almost 4 months now — since Amy died. Since I watched her remains get buried.
God help me!
The wound is non-healing — it strikes like a tidal wave, at times in the most unanticipated moments.
Time is raging forward — and it will, with or without us. I know that she wants me and our children to thrive and to move forward in time, to do good and to live fully and vibrantly, as she did — and in her memory!
Her most meaningful and personal legacy is our children.
But she also leaves this monumental legacy as a physician-scientist and advocate for women’s health. There will be actual women, their numbers and names quantifiable, whose lives will be definitively saved because Amy Josephine Reed MD, PhD walked this earth — and because she fought for a fundamental truth and for ethics in our medical establishment.
Epidemiology tells us, with certainty, that these mothers, daughters, sisters and wives saved will number in the thousands into posterity. They will live, and some will thrive, because Amy lived and walked and fought the gynecological establishment’s blindness.
And me? She leaves me irreversibly changed — for the better.
I am better because I spent half my life with her — 22 years. She touched me and shaped me in ways that neither of us would have ever imagined possible when we first met, and for the first 12 years of our marriage.
I did not know I was married to a modern day Saint. And I know she would roll her eyes to hear me say this about her.
Of course, the malicious, the clueless, and the blind will consider what I say here to be the mark of my grief, perhaps of my grandiose thinking — but they will be wrong as they were all along.
The public fight Amy waged speaks for itself.
It was her fight — and I had the privilege of unleashing every intellectual and rhetorical power I had acquired during 20 years of higher education and medical training to serve as her partner and bull-horn. I had the privilege of loving her and the honor of walking with her in her passionate suffering, minute by minute, as she earned all the meaningful time she could with our children and friends.
All that we wrote together, and said in the course of the nearly four years we campaigned together, is in the public domain. And I hope that it speaks to those who are friends to this nation’s public health — and to women’s and patient’s rights.
But, now, she is no longer physically with me — she no longer finishes my sentences or clarifies what I mean to say or do. She’s no longer here to fill in what I’m missing.
Now, she’s my muse.
She talks to me, eggs me on, critiques me, sets me on fire.
It could be in the middle of the supermarket shopping for the kids’ dinner, or it could be at 2 am, when she wakes me up to think through a problem or a strategy. She is in my head and in my soul. She is under my skin and in my heart. She’s in the tears I shed at the spark of a vivid memory from days past — a younger, care free time long gone.
There’s been no greater honor for me than to have been her husband, partner and father to our children— not titles, not degrees, not accolades, not awards. I am Amy J. Reed’s husband and partner — father to her beloved children.
She considered it a paradoxical privilege to have been thrust into the role of women’s health advocate and activist — as a highly specialized and well-polished academic-physician. She embraced and welcomed this new role, despite her own personal grief over what had happened to her and to our family.
But Her grief was never self-centered. She was not scared or sorry for herself — or for me. She was only sorry that she was leaving our children without a mother at such delicate ages.
Up until the last few hours of her life, she was more concerned about others. She lamented how tired her mother and I looked about 12 hours before she died. And her last cogent sentence to me at 5:30 am on May 24, 2017 was “I love our children”….”I do too, Amy. They are you.”
But what now? I don’t know yet.
As a father, I know she wants me to secure and give wings to our children — and I will do all I can.
I also know that as a man and a citizen, she’s calling me to serve the public good — in her name and in the name of all those vulnerable to the inevitable corruptions of our establishment. Not in a self-promoting and self-satisfying way — but as a war fighter and hell raiser in the face of deadly corruption and injustice. As a radical in the face of the corruptible status quo.
She’s calling me to use all of the understanding and focus I’ve gained from the 4 years of warfare we engaged in the arena of politics, public health and advocacy to do good by those people in harm’s way.
Amy J. Reed always asked “well, what’s next”?
I don’t know yet, Amy….But I feel the call to fight for the privilege of serving and securing the public good to my very core now, as you did.
I pray for the privilege of fighting more battles for the common good and for individuals wronged or harmed, as we did together — and for ethics and justice in our necessarily utilitarian society.
I pray that those who know our fight, those who knew us and those who care to look at what was done and how, give me the chance to fight for them and for the greater glory of our nation’s public health — and in memory of Amy J. Reed.
Amy, my muse, Georgina of Yardley — pray for me.
