The Space Between Us and a Clipboard

By Susie Shaw

I have a fear of clipboards.

It’s not a quirky dislike. It’s not about office supplies or awkward check-ins. It’s a full-body reaction, the kind that makes my skin hot and my heart race and sends me right back to the worst moment of my life.

Let me explain.

So many things happened the day William died. Too many to fully hold or remember. But some things are seared into my body, etched deeper than memory. One of them is the clipboard.

When I finally made it to the ski patrol shed in Big Sky, the place they had taken William after the accident, I had just learned that my beautiful nine-year-old boy was not lost, as we’d hoped. He had died on that mountain.

I walked into the clinic and collapsed into my husband’s arms. We held each other on the floor, broken. I remember the coldness of that room. The chaos. The silence inside me. And then I remember this woman walking toward me. She had a clipboard in her hands. She came right up to me, as I sat there shattered, and began asking for our family’s mailing address.

Our mailing address.

She wanted to know our zip code while my son’s body was just beyond the wall.

I was stunned. Furious. I threw my water bottle at her. I don’t think it hit her, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t myself. I was raw pain and disbelief. Later I felt embarrassed. But in that moment, I had no control. My grief was primal, and it had nowhere to go.

Years later, I retold this story to a friend. Her response was gentle and wise:

“That clipboard was a shield,” she said. “A way to protect herself from your pain.”

And she was right. That clipboard became the physical space between us and humanity. Between our devastation and her discomfort. It gave her something to do, something that didn’t require her to feel what was happening in front of her.

Ever since that day, I recoil when someone approaches me with a clipboard. A few months after William died, I took my mom to the ER for a broken hand. A nurse walked into our curtained space holding one, and I panicked. My body remembered before my brain could. My skin flushed. My ears rang. I fled. That’s when I realized it wasn’t just dislike. It was trauma.

When I prepared for the birth of our third son, Bodhi, I told every nurse, every intake person: please, no clipboards. I had a special registration process. I needed to feel safe. Human. Seen.

To me, the clipboard has come to symbolize a culture of emotional distance, especially in moments when what we most need is connection. It’s a symbol of procedure over presence. A barrier between the person holding the pen and the person who is breaking.

And I get it. People who work in crisis spaces like clinics, ERs, police departments, ski patrol sheds, they're not always trained for what to do emotionally. Sometimes the clipboard is all they have to hold onto. They write things down because feeling things might undo them.

But what I longed for that day in Montana was someone to reach through. Not with a form, not with a checklist, but with a hand. With presence. With humanity.

That’s why I do what I do now. I don’t want to put a barrier between me and the people I support. I want to sit beside them. I want to bear witness to the mess, the rage, the devastation, and the love. I want to help people navigate what grief and trauma actually look like, not in theory, but in real life.

Because grief doesn’t follow protocol. It doesn’t check boxes. And the healing doesn’t come from forms. It comes from feeling seen.