Dr. Gray has Passed Away

 

A colleague from Washington DC informed me last night that my friend and mentor Dr. Sheila Hafter Gray passed away on Tuesday.

She was my mentor/preceptor/supervisor during the four years I spent as a psychiatry resident at Walter Reed in DC from 2002 to 2006.  We considered her our own personal Yoda due to her age, diminutive size, and piercing intellect.  She was a Harvard grad years before I was even born and an OG analyst who also embraced the biomedical side of psychiatry and had her hand in developing the field through research and teaching.

She was a faithful attendee of our Grand Rounds and regularly participated in the question and answer portion by slowly raising her hand with index finger pointed skyward.  Her voice was quiet and a bit shaky which made it difficult to hear her so a microphone would be quickly placed in her hands despite her mild protestations that she did not need it.  WE needed it.  We wanted to hear what she was going to say because it was sometimes funny, oftentimes profound, and always on point, drawn from her vast experience and study.

Dr. Gray was who I sought out to be my supervisor when doing longterm therapy with patients and when I needed a faculty sponsor for my research project that I would ostensibly use for my senior Grand Rounds presentation.  All of the information and data needed for that presentation did not come together in time for that purpose but she helped guide it to publication when it was eventually finished.  In the meantime she provided feedback for a back up presentation I entitled “Combat Stress Control: Past, Present, and Future” that I pulled together as a precursor to my own deployment to a Combat Stress Control unit in Iraq that faced me upon graduation in just a few short months.

And it was during that deployment to Iraq post-graduation where her mentorship as well as friendship was most appreciated.  I found myself in a situation where my commander was forcing me to be involved in a situation that I found morally suspect.  I felt powerless and complicit with seemingly no support which brought out strange feelings of rage and despair in me.  When it was all said and done I thought of Dr. Gray and I sent her an email laying out the situation.  She immediately responded with her wisdom and insight to help me navigate those feelings in order to find some healthy way forward.

A few years later she was putting together a panel for the American Psychiatric Association’s annual conference being held in Washington, DC that year and invited me to join it as a co-presenter.  It included her and the Army’s top research psychiatrist proposing the possibility of adding a military-specific diagnosis to the DSM.  I was tasked to provide the perspective of the boots-on-the-ground soldier-psychiatrist as it were.  We had lunch as a group after the presentation which led to a kind of tradition of finding each other at subsequent annual conferences to have lunch and catch up.

Several years later I finally found a way to process that experience in Iraq by writing a poem about it, "Hiding from the War".  I’d tried to just write it out as a story a time or two over the years, but what I wanted to convey was getting lost and it was put aside.  When the poem was finished Dr. Gray was the first person I shared it with and I subsequently submitted it to be published in the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library literary journal “So It Goes”.

After that I would hear about Dr. Gray from time to time through Doximity notifications that she had been cited in someone’s research paper.  I did not go to the APA conference in early 2020 due to the pandemic but I thought there would be other opportunities to see her there and meet up for lunch.  She seemed quite elderly even back in 2002 and over the years I fell under the delusion that she was going to live forever.  May her memory be eternal.

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