What does it mean to practice empathy when life feels unbearable? In this Radical Bravery conversation, cancer patient and public-health professional Tamatha Thomas-Haase talks with End Well’s Tracy Wheeler and Molly Rosenfeld about the art of being present in the hardest moments.
Through her concept of the Bus Lane, Tamatha challenges us to recognize that we’re all one moment away from life’s biggest changes — and that empathy is how we meet each other there. She offers practical tools for clinicians, caregivers, and loved ones: mirroring, naming emotions without fixing them, and learning to hold two truths at once.
This is a story about courage, inequity, and the radical act of staying human — even when the systems around us aren’t.Tamatha Thomas-Haase brings a unique and powerful voice to healthcare conversations. As a cancer patient and public health professional, she understands both sides of the healthcare equation, and she’s not afraid to speak openly about what’s working and what isn’t.
Edited for clarity and length. Part of our Radical Bravery series.
The Power of Perspective
End Well: Tamatha, you often use a phrase that lands with people: the Bus Lane. What do you mean by it?
Tamatha: We’ve all heard someone say, “Well, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.” I like to invite people to picture themselves standing in the bus lane—because indeed any one of us, or someone we love, can get hit by life at any moment. For me, that’s not a thought exercise; it’s my daily reality. The point isn’t to scare people—it’s to wake us up to how we want to live and care for each other now.
Pull quote: “We’re all standing in the Bus Lane. Empathy is how we meet each other there.”
End Well: When you’re invited to speak from the patient perspective, you’re careful to name the limits of your own vantage point.
Tamatha: My breast cancer experience is a privileged one. I had quick access to diagnostics and specialists, strong family support, flexible work, fewer financial stressors, docs who advocate on my behalf with insurance companies, medications that were clinically trialed on women who look like me. That’s not true for many—especially Black and Brown people, people living in poverty, and those managing mental health conditions. If I offer guidance, I want it checked against other realities, not just mine.
When Healthcare Falls Short
After moving to a new state, Tamatha had to transfer care for her metastatic breast cancer to a new medical center and a new palliative care team. “This isn’t a rural hospital,” she emphasizes. “This is a renowned cancer center.”
Her experience there—particularly with her initial palliative care physician—illustrates how even top-tier medical institutions can miss the mark on basic human connection. Her first visit focused on logistics and prescriptions rather than the empathy she needed most.
“I didn’t need information about constipation,” she reflects. “I definitely didn’t want a Narcan prescription when my pain level was one out of ten. What I needed was empathy—someone who could see the juxtapositions I’m living with every day.”
The Art of Active Listening
Research consistently shows that conversations about dying and end-of-life care are among the most challenging of all communication scenarios, yet physicians and medical students often report feeling inadequately prepared for these discussions. Too often, well-meaning clinicians avoid difficult conversations because they lack training in how to navigate them effectively.
End Well: Your upcoming talk centers on empathy in the clinical encounter. What will that look like?
Tamatha: An empathy-rooted visit improves my living today—and prepares me to die better when that time comes. If my providers make space for, and take time to understand, the dualities of life I’m holding at any given moment, it allows them to provide care and help me make decisions that are grounded in something even more important than my pain chart or my vital signs…my aliveness.
“An empathy-rooted visit improves my living now—and prepares me to die better later.”
End Well: Many loved ones (and clinicians) freeze because they’re afraid to say the wrong thing. You’ve suggested simple “handrails.”
Tamatha: Try mirroring—Active Listening 101. Reflect back what you heard and the possible emotion that lies beneath before you add anything new.
- “It sounds like having scans near the holidays feels extra hard.”
- “It makes so much sense that you feel that way.”
- “Is there more you want me to understand?”
Mirroring lets the other person steer without making anyone wrong. It provides a beautiful runway for the conversation to deepen.
Understanding Your Patients’ Complex Realities
One of Tamatha’s most compelling insights focuses on the complex, often contradictory emotions and experiences that define living with serious illness. These are the contradictions that patients navigate daily—simultaneous experiences that might seem in opposition to each other to outsiders but make perfect sense to those living them. Perhaps it’s the tension between hope and pragmatism, between wanting independence and needing support, or between living fully and preparing for death.
End Well: You also talk about living with juxtapositions—two truths at once.
Tamatha: I can be hopeful and clear-eyed about mortality data in the same breath. I want clinicians to practice holding that with me. As a grounding tool, I ask: “What would your patient’s T-shirt say today?” If you can’t name it—or you’re guessing—start your next visit by asking the questions that would reveal it. What fuels their aliveness? What drains it? Your plan should bridge that gap.
Advocating Within a Broken System
End Well: Let’s talk about self-advocacy. Patients are told to speak up, yet risk being labeled “noncompliant.”
Tamatha: It’s a thin line. For example, insurance approvals often hinge on peer-to-peer reviews; you need your clinicians fighting for you. We have to design systems—and practices—that don’t punish the people who most need help. And for those of us who can take the risk and give feedback to administrators and clinicians about what didn’t work: we simply must do so.
End Well: You worked for decades in public health. How do we reconnect individual care and the health of the whole?
Tamatha: Let’s be honest: the public health system wasn’t designed to optimize everyone’s wellness, and the COVID-19 pandemic exposed these racist cracks. I’m (cautiously) hopeful as public-health-trained people seep into private systems—bringing an individual approach rooted in community, social and political determinants of health, and public service. We also have to tell our story better; the work is vast and invisible until it isn’t.
End Well: You’re heading into another scan cycle, right around the holidays—emotionally loaded for anyone.
Tamatha: Exactly why empathy matters. It won’t change the scan; it changes how I’m held through it. That’s the heart of what I want to model: simple, brave practices that make living fully more possible in the Bus Lane.
Try This (for clinicians, caregivers, and all of us)
Mirroring in 3 lines
- Name what you heard.
- Validate it without fixing.
- Invite the next truth.
The T-Shirt Prompt
- Ask: “If today were a T-shirt, what would it say?”
- Listen for the juxtaposition: Hopeful & Exhausted. Ready to Fight / Ready to Rest.
- Document it. Revisit it. Let it guide care.
Because every person deserves their own version of a good life and a good death—and empathy is one way we get there.
Tamatha Thomas-Haase will be speaking at End Well Radical Bravery in November 2025. For more information and to register, visit our website.