I frequently wonder if I harmed my kids with my dinner-time stories.

Growing up during my medical training, each evening they sat wide eyed while I told about a shooting victim whose brain splattered on my shoe (they saw the stain), or a young mother dying of breast cancer, or an old man unable to say goodbye to his kids.

I never spared a detail, convinced that the more they learned, the better off they'd be.

When my son Greg was 7, I suspected I had made a mistake. He began crying himself to sleep at night and wouldn't say why. Finally, after much cajoling, he agreed to tell me.

”Well…” Here he started bawling. “I just don't want you to die.”

”I'm not dying!” I said.

He looked up as if I were trying to pull one over on him and said, “You're 32, Dad, and…(more bawling) …you're old!”

When my son Dillon was 6, we were visiting my in-laws in Italy, and I decided to tell him where babies come from.

We were in Padua, people all over the place, and without any hesitation or shame, I explained, in English, all of human sexuality, from conception to birthing.

When I said he could ask any questions any time, he said, “One question.”

I was thrilled and told him to ask away.

He asked, “Can we NEVER, EVER talk about this again for the rest of my life?”

My wife, Carla, has coped with this insanity just like the artist she is, translating her world into paintings that blindside me.

Recently she went to Italy, where her aunt lies dying in a coma. My wife heroically fought to have Italian doctors honor her aunt's wishes not to have a feeding tube or intravenous fluids.

All to no avail; one Italian doctor arrogantly said he could and would insert a feeding tube if he wanted. In Italy, she was told, patients' families have little legal recourse.

But even the pope chose not to have a feeding tube, she said. Her aunt is not the pope, they said.

Channeling her frustration into her art, she made a series of arresting paintings of an old woman, trapped and contorted into a prison of flesh.

Years ago, a dear 25-year-old friend of ours had a mastectomy to cure her breast cancer. She wanted to have a baby, but was worried about transmitting a “cancer gene” to her child. When she got pregnant, there was a mixture of joy and fear that was not lost on Carla.

One of my favorite paintings of Carla's is of a pregnant woman with a mastectomy and a bald head. In place of the woman's hair, there are pears, presumably a fruitful blossoming in place of the temporary baldness of chemotherapy.

Last week, I helped Carla hang up her paintings for an upcoming exhibit (Jonathan Edwards Winery, Nov. 20) and was stunned by these paintings' stories - brutal and beautiful, maybe, but stories that are part of all of us.

Jon Gaudio Is A Cardiologist Practicing In New London. E-mail Him At Doctor@theday.com.

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