The Mourning After: A Surgeon’s Compelling Journey of Healing Through Forgiveness

By Keith R. Durante MD PC FACS

Dr. Keith R. Durante, a top-of-the-line surgeon, loving husband and father of three, always thought he’d write a book. He just never believed it would be about grief, grief recovery, forgiveness, and the magic of Uganda.

But his life took a dramatic turn when his daughter, Liz, was killed by a drunken driver before she made it to the airport to fly to Uganda.

Following her death, the author knew his daughter’s work was unfinished and needed to continue. He started Project Liz—The Mountain Pygmy Project in Uganda to honor her, which to this day is a work in progress.
In this book, he recalls how he reacted to the news of his daughter’s death, the grief that ensued, and what he learned on is journey.

He also reflects on performing surgical procedures in remote areas in Uganda and his frequent trips into the impenetrable forest to search for the silverback gorillas that captivated him.
Join the author as he reveals the rigors of being a surgeon, how he lost his way, and what led him to reinvent himself to focus on what really matters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Jul 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798765233443

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Keith R. Durante, MD, PC, FACS.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

Balboa Press

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3346-7 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3345-0 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3344-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022915557

Balboa Press rev. date: 07/20/2023

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

Preface

PART 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

PART 2: THE AFTERMATH

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

PART 3: THE HEALING

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

PART 4: THE GOOD

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Epilogue

To my wife Kathleen—my hero, my spirit, my

life, and mother of my angel, Elizabeth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are too many people to thank without making this its own chapter. I am grateful for everyone who has helped me, no matter how large or small, even if they aren’t listed here. I can’t begin to even think about how grateful I am for my loving parents, family, and friends. I am also profoundly thankful for all the counsel and support I received from professionals along the way.

A special thanks for George—friend, author, ghostwriter, and editor. His inspiration, encouragement and persistence to keep writing and rewriting through the tears will never be forgotten.

Thanks to Abraham, the Project Liz (PL) manager, for his superb talent as an artist and his daily effort to keep PL alive and well. We chat daily about PL events in Uganda. He is like a son to me, and it is a joy to have him in my life. I am forever thankful.

I would like to thank Balboa Press Publishing for their support and editorial team.

Finally, I would like to thank Elizabeth, my angel who was born enlightened and was destined to do great things. Liz grew into a young woman determined to change the world one person at a time until the day she died. My life was just one of the many she saved.

Nothing short of divine intervention brought her to me, and through the changes she’s made in me, my angel will continue to change the world forever.

FOREWORD

By Sister Mary Anna Euring

Go into your grief, for there, your soul will grow.

—Carl Jung

Grief is real, is normal but can also turn your life upside down. As a certified bereavement counselor for thirty-five years, I have guided hundreds of persons through the labyrinthine paths of grief and mourning. Each story is unique yet one that exemplifies the extraordinary resiliency of the human spirit is shared in this story of one man’s journey through profound grief to a new way of life.

Dr. Keith R. Durante is one of those persons with whom I had the privilege of being a compassionate companion as he faced the sudden and devastating loss of his daughter, who was killed by a drunken driver.

Keith is a highly skilled and respected surgeon at Good Samaritan Medical Center where I was a counselor with Bridge to Hope Bereavement Services.

It is my strong belief that with hope, other mourners can and will heal and become whole again.

Many times this is experienced during the counseling session when one gets in touch with the strength of their inner spirit. It was primarily during these moments of sacred silence that I witnessed Keith’s journey from brokenness to wholeness as he gradually moved from anger to forgiveness and ultimately to a spiritual transformation. As Alan Wolfelt states: The present moment is where the needs of the soul reside, and grief work is anchored in soul work.

Throughout this journey into and through grief, he discovered a renewed meaning in his life and now experiences a deepened spiritual self that embraces all the good facets of life. We are all on a spiritual journey, and sometimes it takes a tragedy to provide the courage to walk the path to which we are called. Life is all about choices, and grief offers us the opportunity to either remain bitter and angry or to live with a heightened awareness of the preciousness of each day.

Confronted with the suffering and despair found in the world today, this book offers a positive source of hope for many to continually choose a life awed by the power of forgiveness that motivates Dr. Durante’s deepened life of service.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is mourning and to those who journey with them to experience for themselves the hope and peace that is possible when we face the reality of death, enter fully into grief, and know that whatever happens, all is grace.

—Sister Mary Anna Euring, OP, MS, BCC, CT

Retired chaplain/bereavement counselor

INTRODUCTION

By Father Richard Rohr

I was fortunate enough to meet Doctor Keith R. Durante and his wife, Kathleen, at Christ Church Parish Loft House in Greenwich, Connecticut, following a lecture I had given. My dissertation was on courage, faith, love, and forgiveness. During our discussion, I learned that Keith and Kathleen had gone through an unbelievingly difficult time in their lives with the wanton death of their beloved oldest daughter, Elizabeth. From their heartfelt words, it became apparent that she was an indisputably caring and compassionate young lady. During our discussion, Keith provided the details of what he had personally endured over an extended period, which was one of the most difficult life transitions I had ever heard of anyone experiencing. His journey, as outlined in this book, provides courage and hope to anyone who has ever gone through similar suffering and anguish.

I highly recommend Dr. Keith’s book to everyone who has ever undergone a serious, life-altering event as you will find that there can be light and true happiness at the end of what might appear to be the darkest tunnel of despair.

—Father Richard Rohr, OFM

Father Rohr is a Franciscan friar who offers daily meditations to awaken us to God’s loving presence in all matters and the teachings of Jesus. He is the author of over fifty books including Everything Belongs, Falling Upward, Breathing under Water, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self, The Naked Now, Oneness, and others. He has also appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Super Soul Sunday TV interview.

PREFACE

Why?

Is God a clown who whips away your bowl of soup one moment in order, next moment, to replace it with another bowl of the same soup? Even nature isn’t such a clown as that. She never plays exactly the same tune twice?

—C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

For most of my adult life, I’ve known I would write a book. It was supposed to be an adventure novel because, as you will read, I’ve lived most of my life pushing the limit; that is, in the fast lane, approaching all of life’s twists and turns as welcome challenges from which I would emerge victoriously. I’ve also had a love affair with cars ever since I was a kid, and there’s never been any question that my book’s protagonist would drive a Ferrari F-12. I’d probably go with a Saab for the villain; two dissimilar cars, hence two very different heroes and villains. I hadn’t come to a final decision on that, but the story line would unfold in some exotic faraway place, perhaps in the western Pacific Ocean along the sweeping archipelago of palm-studded islands in Micronesia. On the other hand, maybe I’d go for the glamour and romance of a cosmopolitan European city like Venice, Saint Moritz, or Vienna. People like me always have a plan of some type. We set our goals ahead of time and know the stakes, along with the outcome. My novel would have all the necessary ingredients: sex, money, and death and be matched along with plenty of action and suspense; good versus evil played out in some nefarious plot planned by a macho adversary pitted against a dashing hero who ultimately prevails. I’m a sucker for happy endings because I’ve always believed life is fair, and the good guys always win.

Well, I was correct. I would eventually write a book. But I was also wrong; very wrong, because it never occurred to me that I would write this particular book.

The account that I’m going to share isn’t anything like that adventure novel I had envisioned. Rather, this true-life manuscript began to unfold right in my driveway with a few short sentences spoken with an attempt at compassionate brevity from the lips of a local police officer on the morning of March 7, 2009. If it bears any resemblance to an adventure story, then at best, it’s a profoundly sad voyage through the twists and turns of lives impacted by debilitating grief brought on by a needless and sudden loss. The heroes are many. You’ll meet some of them as you read.

As for the villain, while it was easy to pin the blame on the person responsible for the tragedy, it inevitably became something much more complex as my demons broke me apart better than any worthy adversary ever could have. I was plunged into an emotional and physical free-fall, toward a black, lonely, and bottomless abyss, a location I had never before visited. Ultimately, guilt and my inability to forgive this person—me—sent me spiraling even lower, plumbing the depths of deep depression and despair, to the point that I lacked the strength of character to crush this personal villain. You might ask, Why? That answer is because one villain’s name was Keith.

Part 1

CHAPTER 1

P LEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE myself. I am Keith Durante, MD, a top-of-the-line surgeon, loving husband, father of three, son, brother, and finally, author, but not in the genre I’d assumed—not even close.

It all began on that hauntingly fateful Saturday, March 7, 2009. That particular morning the weather was gorgeous, a true ten. The air was crisp. The heavens were a crystal clear indigo hue, the beautiful spectacle that I think about when envisioning one of the ten best weather days of the year on Long Island, New York, where I live. The vibrant blue of that sunshine typically signaled the waning days of winter and the onset of springtime, with high cirrus clouds floating like sparkling, translucent balloons across the crystal clear sky that brought on enjoyable thoughts of the summer soon to come. It was like that special kind of Colorado blue, that New York City 9/11 vibrant sapphire color that I, like most other New Yorkers, had originally—and wrongly—believed conveyed total tranquility. However, like 9/11, the mayhem and sudden change that entered my life on that day will be etched into my brain forever.

Kathleen, my wife, who is an attorney, was late in returning home from her routine early morning exercise class. Nine-thirty was the norm, and it was now past that time. My son, Keith, a junior in his third year of high school at Friends Academy in Locust Valley, New York, was downstairs studying for the SATs. Our youngest daughter and middle child, KK—short for the first names of my wife and me—was at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, finishing her sophomore year. I believed that Elizabeth, our oldest at twenty, who was a junior at Connecticut College, was aboard a flight to Uganda, Africa, to complete her third mission of delivering much-needed medical care and supplies to over two hundred orphaned children in Kaberamaido, a remote Ugandan village. With a dearth of available natural resources or any semblance of infrastructure as we know it here, the villagers of Kaberamaido were desperate for outside help. Elizabeth would be one of those to deliver whatever was needed. That was what she was always all about—assisting others.

Shortly after nine forty-five, two strapping police officers arrived at our home and rang the doorbell. I was upstairs, still in my pajamas, but stood at the top of the steps with a hot mug of coffee in hand and looked down from the sitting area located off the top side of the staircase landing. I heard Keith Jr. as he plopped down his books on the kitchen counter, walked to the door, and opened it. According to what Keith later told me, an instant adrenaline rush overtook him because there was no mistaking the grave expression on both the officers’ faces. It was obvious that Keith was frightened, so I quickly put on my slippers, rushed downstairs, and took over, standing between him and the policemen.

Are you Doctor Keith Durante? one fellow asked in a serious yet almost soothing tone.

Yes, Officer, I replied. Is something wrong?

Looking at me with steely cobalt eyes that seemingly were staring right through me, he replied, Sir, my name is Sergeant Hanson from the Suffolk County Police Department. I’m afraid we have some bad news to share with you.

Their expressions were serious—dead serious. Little had been spoken, but I began to prepare for the worst. I didn’t want my son, Keith, to hear anything before I did. OK, Officers, I said, but let’s go outside. If you’re going to tell me something awful, I’ll want to hear it before anyone else.

I stepped outside the door, made an immediate left, and walked down my long brick sidewalk to the asphalt where the two police cars were parked about 150 feet away, at the end of my lengthy driveway. I’d asked Keith Jr. to wait inside, but he had nervously followed anyway. I became hypersensitive to every single step, each sight, and every sound. My mind and heartbeat were racing, and my senses were all on full alert. What is this about? I simultaneously sensed myself becoming very vulnerable and weak. I also started to stiffen and prepare for whatever was coming next. Along with this came an inner, instinctive feeling that whatever this might be, it wasn’t going to be good and would hurt very much.

I took a quick mental inventory. Keith Jr. was here with me. KK? She was at