I have just returned from the Eighth World Congress of Psycho-oncology, which was held in Venice on October 18–21, 2006, and attracted the largest number of attendees ever to participate in the annual scientific meeting of the International Psycho-Oncology Society (IPOS). There were close to 1500 participants from 58 countries. Professor Luigi Grassi of the University of Ferrara, the current President of IPOS, was the organizing chair of the Congress, and he and his local scientific committee did a magnificent job of hosting a most diverse and multidisciplinary meeting. A Pre-Congress Psychosocial Academy, consisting of two days of intensive workshops led by outstanding international faculty, was held in beautiful Ferrara, just prior to the start of the Congress in Venice. As the incoming vice president of IPOS, a member of the Psychosocial Academy held in Ferrara, and an active scientific participant in the Eighth World Congress in Venice, it is fair to say that I was pretty busy. In fact, because of all of my activities related to this conference and IPOS, I was away from home and work for nine full days, the longest time I've ever been away from my family. This commitment of an unusually inordinate amount of time to a scientific conference activity made me sit down and evaluate whether the commitment of that much time was really worth it. I was aware, the entire time I attended the conference-related activities, that I needed to come away with at least one important lesson, idea, thought, or inspiration; otherwise I would have felt that I had not spent the time wisely. In other words, I needed the answer to the questions “What brought me to Venice, and where was I going beyond Venice?” Existential questions? Of course!

We are born. We live. We die. In between birth and death is a life that is filled with joy and sadness, laughter and tears, tragedy and triumph, suffering and healing. This life can be long or short in duration. The events in our lives can be given meaning or appear to be absent of meaning. The events in our lives can be given value and judged as “good” or “bad,” “just” or “unjust,” or they can be interpreted as random valueless events. One's perspective on these aspects and events of human existence are often shaped by our religious beliefs (or lack of them), our experiences, and our instincts. Ultimately, however, the task of every human being is to find the means by which one can live a mortal life that is inevitably characterized by finiteness and the existential truths that have been described above. Simply put, the challenge of life is to learn how to balance hope and despair, to learn how to live with the inevitability of death and suffering.

At a recent scientific conference in New York City, a student asked one of the scientists participating in a panel discussion on science and religion a provocative question. “Can you be a good scientist and also believe in God?” The scientist, a Nobel laureate, quickly responded: “Belief in the supernatural, especially belief in God, is not only incompatible with good science, this kind of belief is damaging to the well-being of the human race!” But disdain for religion is far from universal among scientists. Francis Collins, who directs the U.S. National Genome Research Institute and was head of the first team to map the entire human genome, is an example of a highly visible and respected scientist who also openly embraces a religious Christian faith. As palliative care clinicians and researchers, we, as well as our patients, are constantly confronted with this very dilemma: the age-old tension between faith and reason, God and science.

Growing up on New York City's Lower East Side of the 1950s there were no other Breitbarts to be found, so it was not surprising that I would be drawn to the heroic legend of my famous ancestor and namesake, Siegmund (Zishe) Breitbart. My parents were survivors of the Holocaust, born in Turka, a small shtetl in Galicia, Poland, not far from the Lodz birthplace of the “greatest Jewish strongman—the modern Samson.” Being related to the famous Jewish “Iron King” was, for me, a proud link to a legacy of strength, courage, and defiance in an environment scarred by the profound losses and overwhelming grief of my generation of “children of survivors.” In 1994, I attended the International AIDS Congress in Berlin, and was the first Breitbart, to my knowledge, to visit Zishe's grave site in a small Jewish cemetery in the former East Berlin. Zishe Breitbart was a looming figure of strength in my subconscious.

Waiting…. We've all done it. We have all had that universal experience of waiting. Waiting for news; waiting in line; waiting in traffic. Waiting can be distressing, exciting, or a neutral experience. It all depends on the context. Waiting in line at the store is a rather neutral experience, especially if the line is short and you are not running late for something important. Waiting to see your child come off of the bus after a 3-day school trip can be exciting and full of joyous expectation. Waiting for the results of a biopsy, taken from your child's liver to determine if he has a life-threatening illness, is an experience filled with pain and fear. This last context of waiting is the subject of this brief essay.

I have been living with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) for 20 years. For 20 years I have gone to sleep with MS, awakened with MS, worked with MS, fell in love with MS, got married with MS, went through five miscarriages with MS, gave birth to a beautiful son with MS, raised a son whose life would be marked by the MS of a parent, and most importantly, I will go on living with MS for as long as fate allows. My wife Rachel has MS.