In Being Mortal, best-selling author Atul Gawande defines courage as “strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped.” In Robert’s painting, Mr. S. is told that he will die, the doctors appear like Herculean angels delivering news of his impending death. The doctors are unflinching, rock-solid professionals and their human grip offers strength and compassion at this threshold moment. The patient is a man of faith. He looks frail, vulnerable and uncertain. But he holds his cross up as a sign that he’s not alone. Religion gives him purpose and meaning. About this sense of purpose, Gawande writes: ‘We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way.”

This painting is a depiction of a scene Robert observed while accompanying doctors in their daily rounds of the cancer ward. Robert did not paint the actual patient involved in this traumatic scene. Instead he asked Harvey Seasons, the well-known Halifax priest who became an actor, to pose for him.