Savage Grace: The Life of Catherine Schaffer

Catherine Schaffer was difficult to define. She was fiercely loyal to her friends, did not suffer fools easily, and had creative abilities born of hardship, emotional intensity, restlessness, and her never-ending quest to become more fully human. Her steadfast defense of those she deemed underdogs was legendary and often got her into trouble with administrations and bureaucracy.

Her role as a Physician Assistant took her down many paths and exposed her to many forms of human suffering. She took her role seriously and did everything she could to ease her patients' pain. Her final focus in surgical oncology seems to have been the point at which she felt her entire lifetime in medicine finally came together. She was accepted and valued for her continued efforts to engage with patients, many of whom were living with shortened life spans due to cancer. Throughout her career, she believed medicine was not only about treating disease but also about helping patients hold the psychic pain that illness imposed on identity, dignity, and hope.

Her writings in Savage Medicine are grounded in emotional questions about how we treat patients and how systems treat their providers. She was among the first in her health system to discuss burnout when it emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But her life did not just revolve around her patient work. Schaffer was incredibly creative and loved ballroom dancing and making art. She spent fifteen years with the same dance partner, winning multiple medals and titles along the eastern seaboard. Her relationship with Andrei, her partner and teacher, was emotionally intense and artistically beautiful, but complicated by their age difference and separate familial obligations. When they danced, their rhythm and chemistry stood out, and they were well known in the ballroom community.

Her artwork was unusual, and she worried it might be interpreted as perverse. She spent a great deal of time documenting in her artwork the distortion of identity and femininity caused by a cancer diagnosis. She used cells seen under a microscope in her paintings to illustrate the distortion of life that cancer causes, particularly breast and pancreatic cancer. Her work has been shown worldwide because of its impact on viewers. For Schaffer, beauty was never ornamental. It was restorative, a counterweight to suffering and a way of remaining emotionally alive in a world that often rewarded numbness.

Her relentless pursuit of becoming was often seen by others as isolating and snobbish. But the truth was far more complex than that. She loved feeling like she belonged, but it took her many years to finally recognize that her community would never include everyone. She was more introverted than extroverted by nature and had no problem spending days alone with her rescued toy poodle, Sadie, writing or painting.

Her memoir, Savage Grace, chronicles Schaffer’s overcoming circumstances that would ordinarily have doomed a person to a life of struggle and financial despair. In it, she documents a childhood filled with violence, the sometimes comedic and rash ways that a teenager concocts to escape that life and her emergence into adulthood and life as a PA. Savage Grace is a story of overcoming, reinvention in the second half of life and the courage it takes to work through complex life situations. Again and again, Schaffer reinvented herself, not out of vanity but out of survival. Each creative awakening became a spiritual attempt to reclaim parts of herself that hardship, medicine, marriage, and responsibility had buried.

Her personality had some difficult dissonances as well. As much as she loved spending time alone, she constantly struggled with loneliness. She had difficult relationships with her immediate family. Some of her deepest grief came from fractured relationships with her children — losses she carried quietly, even while trying to understand the generational wounds beneath them. Her middle daughter, Rachal, was her pride and joy, and they shared a warm relationship as Rachal grew into adulthood. Her other daughter remained distant, but they would share occasional text messages. Her son remained uncommunicative, and she remained heartbroken her entire life over the chasm between them. Her siblings were a phone call away, but they might as well have been on the other side of the world. They communicated irregularly, but she always loved it when they were able to connect.

She trusted few people to hold her friendship with care. One of those people was her dance partner, Andrei; the other was a friend she had stayed in touch with since eighth grade, Edie. There were other people in her life, but they came and went with the wind.

In the end, Schaffer’s life was less about achievement than about the relentless pursuit of wholeness. She remained, until her final years, a woman trying to understand how suffering could coexist with beauty and whether the pursuit of becoming fully human was itself a form of grace.