Fierce advocate for children remembered

2020 has taken a lot of people from us. People we’ve loved (200,000 deaths from COVID and counting), people we admired ( Justice Ginsberg, Congressman John Lewis, the Rev. C.T. Vivian), and people we may not have known, but whose death shook us (George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery). In the middle of so much loss, the deaths of many people who spent their lives working hard in the background may be overlooked.

Dr. Margi Rosenthal cannot be one of those people.

Margi, who died this week after a long battle with colon cancer, was a friend and colleague to us. But more than that, she was an advocate, a teacher and a beloved pediatrician in in the city of New Haven.

Dr. Rosenthal was an incredible doctor. Her eyes lit up when she unwrapped a swaddled baby to listen to its heart or blew bubbles for a toddler afraid of upcoming shots. She counseled thousands of parents about their teenagers and hugged hundreds of mothers struggling with feeding their newborns.

Outside of the clinic, Margi continued to be a fierce advocate for children. Did you raise children in New Haven? Margi advocated for you. She worked to ensure that your kids (and ours) have access to good food, good education and a safe place to grow. She researched maternal mental health, and advocated for support for mothers, partnering with nonprofits and peer educators in New Haven. She believed that the best support for children lay in empowering their community to care for them collectively, and studied group well child visits as a place where parents could come together and teach and learn from their unique experiences, being supported by their pediatricians, nurses, social workers and child life specialists, to raise children together. Margi believed that one of her most important roles was in allowing families in a community to tell doctors what they need — and then she studied it, through community-based participatory research, which she taught to anyone who would listen at Yale. She believed in parents knowing they are experts in caring for their children.

Personally, Margi was a teacher and a mentor none of us will forget. She mentored younger doctors the same way she lived — gently, lovingly, and committed to the betterment of the world around her. She taught us how to advocate and practice medicine like she did, and how to write publicly on behalf of our patients and her learners went on to write, and write and write.

She cared for us, as colleagues, friends and trainees, and taught us to be more like her. If you were lucky enough to learn from her, in one of her research practice classes or in a side conversation for a few minutes, you learned to do research with a community, not assuming its needs or focusing on its deficits, but in support of how it hopes to grow.

Above all, Margi was a person who welcomed you alongside her through her prolific writing — about her mothering, her friendships, her grief. Through her essays, she was transparent about suffering early loss in the death of her husband, about the challenges of being a single mother of two young children and a pediatrician, about the joys of caring for her patients and the frustrations with their struggles in a broken system. She spoke of navigating the world as a person with cancer, of her awareness of her own mortality and desire to spend her time committed to the things she loved — her daughters, her life and her work. She told stories of summer camps, of intimate conversations with her loved ones, and of her hopes for the future. Through her stories, she helped us make sense of our own lives — our own difficult diagnoses, parenting struggles, professional successes and failures, and hopes for how we want to spend our days. She challenged us to remember that “the way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives,” and she lived that way every day — amazed by the world, thankful for the small gifts of a warm knitted hat and a fifth-grader succeeding in school, loving of her community and gracious with her colleagues.

Dr. Margi Rosenthal was a true inspiration in the city of New Haven — a quiet hero, working in the background for the good of our kids and for the strengthening of ties in our community. In keeping with her Jewish tradition, Margi lived a life of acts of “tikkun olam,” leaving the world better than she found it. We are better for having found her.