Three Doctors (2024)

Genre: Jazz rock

[DISCLAIMER: This song is not intended to disparage the medical profession. Along the way, I’ve known many empathetic, compassionate, and expert doctors, nurses, PAs, nurse practitioners and others—some of whom are family members and some of whom I credit with saving my life. Dealing with the health care “industry” in the United States—that’s another story altogether…]

I suspect anyone hearing Three Doctors for the first time might assume that it was written during the COVID pandemic. Actually, the idea for the song predates that calamity by five years. Here’s the background:

My younger sister died in 2017 at the premature age of 52 of an aggressive form of metastatic breast cancer. She spent many years sick and in pain, traveling long distances for treatment. One Spring, when things got particularly bad, she was taken to the hospital, then to Hospice, where she spent the last four months of her life in palliative care. She was never able to return home. It was agonizing for her and the family, who kept a daily vigil at her bedside. Some elements of the verses came from that lived experience.
My sister was a wonderful person and a larger-than-life character. She was my parents’ youngest child with four older brothers, so she had to carry her own. She lived her life with her own brand of assertiveness and joyful irreverence that endeared her to everyone she met.

I’ve written three songs about her, one upbeat and hopeful (Sister-Lee), one somber and reflective (Penciled In—yet to be released), and this one, for which I chose a semi-sassy tone that also fits her to a T. I tried to imagine how I might feel sitting in that Hospice bed for four months in the process of dying and superimposed my own feelings on top of it.
After she passed, I spent several years trying to come to grips with my own grief, a long meditation on death and dying that involved intensive reading and eventually a pilgrimage to Greece, the “holy” land for those of us skeptical of the Abrahamic faiths. No wonder there are references to Greek mythology in the text.

In the process I was also introduced to the medieval concept of memento mori, the trope often used by the Medieval Church during the Black Plague in Europe.

Memento mori (Latin, literally ‘remember (that you have) to die’) =
an object serving as a warning or reminder of death

In the face of the carnage brought by a disease no one understood, it was a way for baffled authorities to remind people that death is our common destiny. Paintings of the danse macabre depicted the inevitability of death as the great equalizer, uniting all people, rich or poor. We are all—as paintings and songs of the time suggested—dancing ourselves toward the grave. To use a common chess analogy, when the game is over, the king and pawn end up in the same box. Or, as modern interpretations might paraphrase it: “Life is a terminal disease and no one gets out alive.”

I serendipitously stumbled on the idea for the chorus from two biographies I was reading in the summer of 2018.

The first was Chopin: A Biography. The composer, Frederic Chopin, was ill most of his adult life with respiratory disease. He and his lover, George Sand, would often seek out warmer climates more conducive to health and writing. In the winter of 1838, they traveled to Palma in the western Mediterranean, hoping to find just such a refuge, but after a week of good weather, hurricane force winds visited the island and Chopin was caught once again in circumstances that only aggravated his conditions. George Sand wrote to the French consul to ask him to send a doctor.

As Chopin reported in a letter to his childhood friend, Julian Fontana:

“Palma, December 3, 1838

The three most celebrated doctors on the island have seen me: one sniffed at what I spat, the second tapped where I spat from, and the third sounded me and listened as I spat. The first said I was dead, the second that I am dying, and the third that I’m going to die—and I feel the same as always.”

Marek, George R. and Gordon-Smith, Maria. Chopin. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, (138).

Later that same summer, when reading one of my favorite writers of history and biography, Joseph Ellis, I came across a matching quote in American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. Ellis wrote of Jefferson that as he grew older and was forced to chronicle his own physical decline:

“He remained to the end congenitally suspicious of all doctors, claiming that when he saw three physicians together, ‘he looked up to see if there was not a turkey-buzzard in the neighborhood.’”

Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Vintage Books, 1998, (274).

At that point, the title and chorus were pretty well locked in.

I’ve had my own run-in with age-related poor health. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2009 and I spent the year visiting various doctors to get second, third (sometimes more opinions) before I made my treatment selection. Of course, they were not all in the same room at the same time, but the image of “three” doctors was stuck in my mind.
Thirteen years after my first diagnosis, after I thought I was free and clear of cancer, I discovered that remnants of the disease remained in my body and are now lodged in lymph node and bone. Overnight, I went from remission to Stage IV cancer. Although I’m now again “treating” the disease, I have no idea what this second round of treatment will bring.

When I first wrote these lyrics, I thought I was writing about my sister or maybe about the universal experience of death. I couldn’t possibly have imagined that I was writing them for myself. When I sing them now, I’m cognizant of my own brief tenure on the planet, with gratitude for all the time I’ve had, and encouragement to cherish the time I have left.

Three Doctors, then, is a song in my memento mori series—a reminder to myself: “You too, are mortal.”

NOTE: For those interested in the technical side of things, this is the first track I’ve released that is almost all me. With the exception of the computer-generated drum track, which I doctored (pun intended), I play bass, organ, piano, horns (via MIDI keyboard) and sing. No Band-in-a-Box this time.