We practiced it in a room that did not smell like death. There were no machines, no urgency—just plastic chairs arranged in a circle and a tutor who insisted that grief could be managed if delivered correctly. She called it breaking bad news. As though news, like bones, had a clean point of fracture.

We took turns. One of us would play the mother. The rest of us would learn how to look at her without flinching. How to sit. How to soften our voices at the right syllables. How to let silence stretch, but not too long—it must never feel like abandonment.

“I’m sorry,” we were taught to say first. Not hello. Nor are you alone. Please do not sit down. Just, I’m sorry.

We practiced where to place our hands. Not on the body. Never on the body. The shoulder, if necessary. The forearm, if invited. Grief, it turns out, has boundaries.

I was good at it. Not the best in class, but precise. Measured. I did not rush the words. I did not choke on them either. I held them the way you hold something fragile but expected to break.

After my turn, the tutor nodded. “Again,” she said. “But this time, slower. Let her feel it arriving.” So, I did. I learned how to make death enter a room gently.

We were told to study the faces of the mothers. Not to see them as mothers, but as vessels of emotion. To anticipate the moment their world would tilt. To catch the tremor of denial before it set in. To watch for the first fissure of anger, the second of despair, the quiet collapse that followed.

We memorized the signs as though they were medical charts. Eye twitch. Hand clench. Breath caught in my throat. Each reaction had a corresponding technique, a step-by-step guide on how to manage it without allowing the chaos to spill over into ourselves.

We practiced with roleplay scenarios. Leukaemia. Car accident. Drowning. Fire. All imagined, all rehearsed. All exercises in controlled devastation. Each rehearsal left my hands tingling, not with fear, but with anticipation. A performer preparing for a show with no applause, only silence that carried consequences too heavy for most to bear.

I would watch my classmates stumble, their voices faltering under the weight of words. Their eyes watering at the pretence of tragedy. I would smile inwardly, a small, private satisfaction. Not because I was cruel. Not exactly. But because I could maintain the detachment that everyone else struggled to preserve.

I learned early to separate the human from the professional. The suffering from the procedure. The pain from the delivery. That detachment became a shield, polished and shiny, and I wrapped it around myself, tighter each day, until I feared I might never remove it.

And then, one evening, a real call came. Not a rehearsal. Not a simulation. The kind that leaves marks on your uniform and your conscience.

I was summoned to a ward where a mother waited, pacing the floor, a cup of tea long gone cold in her hands. The patient—a boy, twelve years old, frail and pale—had been admitted three days prior with complications that would not relent. The nurses briefed me quickly, the boy had suffered sudden organ failure. Nothing more could be done.

I walked to her room, checklist in hand, script memorized. My hands were steady. My voice was ready. I had practiced this, over and over. I had rehearsed the exact pitch, the exact timing of the pauses. I had perfected the angle of my gaze, soft but unwavering.

I opened the door. She turned toward me, hope still lingering like a thin veil. I saw the flicker of expectation, and for the first time, the room felt heavy in a way no training session had prepared me for. My shield wavered. I felt the tiniest pulse of something that might have been fear. Or guilt. Or empathy. I did not know.

I started. “I’m sorry.”

Her eyes widened, not with relief, but with disbelief. She tilted her head, searching my face for clues, for a betrayal of the words I was about to say. I followed the script: softened tone, measured pause, silence long enough to allow understanding to seep in without letting the room collapse entirely. The script worked.

I watched her world fracture according to the timing I had rehearsed. She reached for the boy’s bedrail and I waited, just a beat too long, because that was what we had practiced. She screamed, then wept, then sank to the floor. My voice had delivered the news. My hands had stayed in the prescribed position. The words had landed as they should, like a stone dropped into a quiet pond, ripples contained.

But the silence afterwards… It was different from practice. It was raw. Untamed. It had teeth. I had delivered the news correctly, precisely, professionally. And yet, a part of me recoiled. I realized then that while I had learned to perform grief, I had not learned to feel it.

I left the room, my uniform heavier than it had been moments before. The hallway smelled faintly of antiseptic and despair. I walked with measured steps, just as I had been trained to walk, but inside, I was a different person than the one who had entered. A fragment of my own humanity had gone into that room with her and stayed behind, folded in the folds of a mother’s despair.

Later, I could not recall her face clearly. Not the lines of grief, nor the eyes, nor the trembling hands. All I remembered was my own voice, steady and rehearsed. The words had worked. The script had been followed. The delivery was perfect. And yet, something inside me had shifted irreversibly.

I began to notice it in the days that followed. I checked my reflection in the mirror more often, tracing the lines of detachment forming quietly across my own face. I rehearsed my empathy in front of myself, ensuring my tone remained even, my expression neutral, my hands controlled. I realized that performance had become survival. The feeling was dangerous. Feeling was a vulnerability that could break me if I allowed it to seep through.

I started paying attention to the way my colleagues spoke after these moments. Some laughed too loudly in the cafeteria. Some retreated into silence. Some cried alone, hidden behind locked doors. I observed them clinically, cataloguing the coping mechanisms, the defences, the cracks forming beneath the surfaces. I recognized their strategies because I had used them, and yet I did not recognize my own.

Each new patient was another rehearsal. Each new death was another opportunity to practice the art I had mastered. I walked the fine line between detachment and empathy, unsure which side I truly occupied anymore. I had become fluent in grief without embracing it, a translator of suffering who no longer understood the language of sorrow.

I began to dream of the training room. The plastic chairs, the tutor’s instructions, the rehearsed mothers, all repeating endlessly. I would wake with the words “I’m sorry” stuck in my throat, perfect in tone but hollow in meaning. I would practice in my sleep, my hands held just so, my pauses measured, my gaze soft but not tender.

The dreams grew more vivid. In them, I stumbled, broke protocol, said the words incorrectly, or paused too long. The mothers in these dreams were always alive, moving, reaching, accusing. I woke in a sweat, heart hammering, afraid of what rehearsal had done to me: trained for empathy, but numb to its pulse.

At home, I tried to reconnect with the world outside the hospital walls. Friends, laughter, ordinary life—they all seemed distant, unreal, muted. I saw children playing on the street and felt a pang I could not name. I noticed mothers carrying infants and felt the weight of absent sorrow that was not mine. The world outside lived and breathed, and I was caught in a liminal space, the echo of a script that refused to end.

I thought about returning to the training room, sitting in the plastic chair, letting the tutor call me forward. I would step into rehearsal once more, not as a student, but as a witness to my own estrangement. And I would say the words, I am sorry. I have learned them well. I have practiced them too long. I have forgotten what they mean.

And then, one morning, I realized something. Perhaps the training never intended to teach empathy, but control. Perhaps the art was not about understanding grief, but about mastering your own reactions. The script worked, yes, and in doing so, it protected me from collapse—but it also carved out a space where feeling had been silenced, where my own humanity had been postponed indefinitely.

The script worked. It always worked. But I am not sure I did.

Now, each time I step into a room, each time I prepare to deliver words that will fracture a life, I carry both the skill and the absence it creates. The hands are steady, the voice is measured, the pauses are perfect. And behind it all, a quiet question persists: when will the performance end, and when will I finally feel again?

 

 

 

 

 

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