He Is Gone, and I Have Lost a Kindred Spirit: Mourning a Patient Who Was a True Soulmate

Since I taught myself medicine and began treating patients, I have met tens of thousands, yet few could truly be called kindred spirits.

Brother Zhao, a man from Shaoxing, Zhejiang, is the only soulmate I have met in all these years—someone whose temperament and life ideals matched my own so closely. He was only three years and a few months older than I, and, like me, he had fought his way up from the countryside on his own.

Yesterday at noon—the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, 2017—he died in a hospital in Houston, Texas, after treatment failed. Even now I can hardly accept that he is gone.

We both studied medicine and did business. His father and my mother both died of cancer a few years ago. His lot was harder than mine: he himself was a malignant-melanoma patient, a tumor that progresses with extraordinary speed.

When we first met, he told me he had read everything I had written, and that my inner voice had struck a deep chord. After a long talk we became the closest of friends; from then on we walked together, saving ourselves while trying to save others on the anticancer road.

A person who has only done business, who has never studied or practiced medicine and never lost a close relative, cannot understand another as deeply as we understood each other.

He was a successful businessman and investor; I, too, had once had modest success in business and investment. Because we had both studied medicine and both lost a close family member to cancer, we reached a point where, in many things, we knew each other's thoughts without words.

Out of shared sympathy, our common wish was to heal and save people. But we also knew that saving the world is no simple thing.

The current practice environment is not good. Stories of doctors saving people only to be harmed by those they saved are endless. I have had my share of troubles from patients over the years, so in practicing I have grown more cautious day by day.

Brother Zhao had a grand vow: he wanted to found an institution that would truly help cancer patients. This coincided exactly with my own ideal.

Many treat such a wish as mere wishful thinking, never to be acted on.

But he put it into practice. Meeting impoverished cancer patients, he quietly supported them, spending freely. As a cancer patient himself, as long as his health allowed, he sought out everywhere ways to benefit cancer patients.

He had a grand plan: he hoped to invest in building many nonprofit cancer-rehabilitation centers for the benefit of cancer patients everywhere. He hoped I would join him in completing it.

No one is more helpless than an oncologist. The patient is right before your eyes, begging to live and pinning great hopes on you, yet only a few can truly be saved; most patients ultimately die during treatment.

I have lived through too many partings. The repeated blows have left me less confident than he.

In earlier years, when I had a little surplus, I helped out some poor tumor patients. I know full well that, from both the medical-technical and the economic standpoint, Brother Zhao's ideal was partly unrealistic.

Moreover, I did not want him, already so gravely ill, to run himself ragged without rest. He was a kind-hearted man. To every patient he helped, he gave not only financial support but, when a patient developed a symptom no one could solve, his inner anguish was no less than that of the patient's family; he scoured everywhere for reliable doctors and treatments to help them.

At one point, the pleas he sent me on behalf of patients he was helping outnumbered those he sent about his own illness.

Over these years I have met many cancer patients and families with similar wishes, yet few threw themselves into helping others as selflessly as he did. Among the wealthy patients I have known, he may not have been the richest, but he was certainly the most generous and compassionate.

He bought land in both America and his hometown, wanting only to grow medicinal herbs to give free of charge to poor patients. At one point he badly wanted to rent me more than 300 mu of land in Beijing as a Chinese-medicine cultivation base, but I declined.

He only hoped that all the money he earned for the rest of his life, beyond his family's basic living expenses, would go to charity. When I was threatened by an unreasonable patient's family, Brother Zhao also stepped forward to stand by me.

Until two weeks before his death, he was still rescuing other patients. He said to me, "Doctor Zhou, when you meet a patient from a poor family, tell me, and I will help them."

For various reasons, I did not, as he wished, provide him with many people to support.

Cancer treatment is a bottomless pit; no matter how much money an ordinary family has, it can all be spent. To let him bear too much would do nothing for his own health. I repeatedly urged him not to be so fixated on helping others, that resting and recovering were most important—only when he was well could he help more people. Besides, he had a family to feed; life is hard for everyone.

I do not know whether Brother Zhao's spirit understands that what I did was for the sake of his health. Perhaps for him, the meaning of life lay in helping others.

Shortly before he died, he asked to give me a large sum of money to improve my medical-research conditions, and I refused. I even urged the patients he was supporting not to take too much from him, so as not to burden him too much; he was somewhat downcast about it.

His family was as kind-hearted as he. No sooner had he passed than his sister came to ask how much I had spent on his treatment and medicines, how much her brother owed me, so that she could repay it. Of course I would not take a cent from this kind brother's family.

For more than ten years, countless patients have died under my care, and I have never once wanted to attend any patient's memorial. But this time my heart told me I must see Brother Zhao off on his final journey.

I do not know whether I will ever meet such a kindred, such kind-hearted soul again; in all these years I have met only this one. It is precisely because I have felt these pains myself that people like him and me can exist in the world in this way.

My brother repeatedly told me to spare myself, not to break my health. Yet was he not himself a man who, thinking of others, disregarded his own health?

Above the rolling rivers, beneath the moon over a thousand peaks, in the vast world my kindred spirit is gone, leaving only me. My heart aches, and no one knows my sorrow!

Spirit of my elder brother, not far away, please accept the three bows of your younger brother!

Alas, may you rest in peace!

Your weeping younger brother, Zhiyuan, bows.